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LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 


PRINCETON, N. J. 


PURCHASED BY THE 
MRS. ROBERT LENOX KENNEDY CHURCH HISTORY FUND. 





BX 945 .W7 1926 

Wright, Cuthberr. 

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THE STORY OF THE | 


Catholic ae 


BY CUTHBERT ‘WRIGHT 





ALBERT €? CHARLES BONI 
NEW YORK  ::  MCMXXVI 





Copyright, 1926, by Albert & C harles Bom, Inc, 


Manufactured in the United States of America 








Contents 
®rigins [30-1000] 

CHAPTER PAGE 
1. JESUS in Piece ek eck IN UDe tars Mane Na Seely 3) II 

i. Pau. a ihig Seas ote ain Cah n't, ein aa © 21 
PLL SLOW TO" EGA RTE 0. heer reir. SRN. SN aaa dhe 27 
TV BOR OANEZATION dott (eater pei 100, eit Me Stl '5 kee 36 

v. CHRIST AND CHSAR SSE UPL Cie Pe Pome 47 
MIRAE RES Ye dite cage N Ter eah leet Se gy keg 54 
vir. Monasticism SPER. COELY tes 68 


The Consummation [1000-1300] 


ITIL En VITR AGE Or Manson ia Wer cern “a NNUne ewes 81 
Ix. THE CaTHOLIC CHURCH AND THE FEUDAL 

STATE OID thar hh Sata hal BEN Ppt Se th 87 

x. THE ApocaLyPsE OF SainT Louis . . = 104 

xt [Hs ‘CENTURY OF SAINT LOUIS. redo 0 2.7 1tg 


SILOM ART AND THE CHURCH SV mie ae hegre TO 


The Catastrophe [1300-1800] 


Iti MOR CADENUS Vel eam ive WKY yh Minar Mt hah kre 
LMS ERSO Ny crite WMreoruiet® 9H hee a et ra Tes 
xv. THe Borcias .. be GMail WAL ech Ey 2 
STL SU EEL E Rind emi pomond viata hs wie tM Toth t sath iia ie ST" 


xvul. EccLtes1A ANGLICANA . : : : t 183 
SENATE RSL WEA Tie ML OEAAR tk RE etad Po Tee het? Skeid Oh gene 190 
xIx. THE Last CRUSADE A : 4 ; 197 





Contents 


CHAPTER PAGE 
xx. THE WuitrE PLuME Poti Dhaene Ree eee 
xxI. GRANDEUR AND DECLINE OF THE GALLI- 

CAN CHURCH . . : : ; : 221 
xxl. Ninety-THREE ne NaS fas ete honing i et eh a 


FModern Times [1800-1918] 


xx. RoMANTICISM Vey CEL TE eR cto 
X&IVs (ULTRAMONTANISM, “00856 0 Ph ear) el we ee 
SRV. cIVLODERNISM © 0 907 "a P7002 cole ete apes eal ed eae 
SOVitdio Lt, pak, mth ates Seana tinea ee GAR ota ara) eg eae 
xxvll. THE CaTHotic CHURCH IN AMERICA .  . 278 
Unro-Tnis [Asta ty are’ oo ee ts oe es ee 
APPENDIX: ON THE LiruRGY one a. os 


Giossary or EccLesiasTIcAL TERMS. . 301 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE Se heel hah eee 
BIBLIOGRAPHY SPRL CNETGES NUR ty (ok Le 





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THE STORY OF THE 
CATHOLIC CHURCH 


CHAPTER I 
JESUS 


Tue Christian Church, which even Protestants 
still like to call “Catholic,” * is said to have been 
founded about 30 A.p. by Jesus of Nazareth, an 
obscure Syrian peasant, a Jew, who suffered a vio- 
lent death at the hands of his more respectable 
coreligionists. This being has probably provoked 
more written controversy than any other historic 
personage, but in plain matter of fact, there is sin- 
gularly little to be known about him. So little, 
indeed, that there are those whose studies have led 
them to deny that he has ever existed. 

But why speak of books and the controversies of 
scholars? This name, Jesus, has for nineteen cen- 
turies been the dominating fact in the civilization 
of the western hemisphere. It remains the still 
acknowledged center of the elaborate religious 
radiations which the man Jesus is said to have set 
in motion. Everywhere in Europe, Asia, America, 
on the desolate Russian steppe, in the undulant In- 


* “T believe in the Holy Catholic Church” . . . words used in the 
service of most Protestant bodies. 
1 


12 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


dies, in the heart of the African jungle and the 
Australian veldt, under the elms of white New 
England townships, and even in the closed and 
jealous empires of the far Orient, rises that shame- 
ful and resplendent symbol of his which the first 
Christian emperor saw in the evening clouds. The 
most remote and primitive human group is always 
first indicated to the traveler by its belfry and its 
cross. One church is within sound of another, and 
so on to the extreme limits of the Occident. Often 
it is the only thing that remains over from the past. 
In a community all new, or in one newly recon- 
structed from the devastations of war, it is always 
the first edifice to rise. In the graveyards that 
cluster under the shade of each belfry it is the 
same thing. ‘Each dead man,” says a French 
writer, ‘“‘brandishes above his tomb the one symbol 
as if to recall the compact which has assured him 
his immortality.” All else has perished; even his 
own body has become indistinguishable from the 
dead earth which forms his grave; only the Church 
remains and above his dust the Cross. They pro- 
claim that on this one essential point—the worship 
of a god in human form—all those vanished gen- 
erations, knowing nothing of us or of each other, 
have agreed. 

The history of the West from the fall of Rome 
has sprung from a single generating fact—Jesus. 
He is in European history what the writer of Rev- 
elation saw him in vision, alpha and omega, the 


JESUS 13 


beginning and the end. For his sake men have 
loved and also hated each other; they have run 
through the whole gamut of human passions from 
the ferocious egoism of the brutes to the most ab- 
solute self-surrender. For ,him~they have made 
the Crusades, built the basilicas of France and 
Italy, edified the Summa of Saint Thomas, com- 
posed the balsamic chants of the Middle Ages. On 
him has at times depended the destiny of science, 
beauty, reason. He was and still is the corner- 
stone in the structure of occidental society. A 
child, helpless in the arms of his mother, is, with- 
out his own knowledge, promised to Jesus, bap- 
tized in his name. And ever afterward it is im- 
possible for him to efface the mystical brand. 
“Once a Catholic, always one.” Even should he 
become the enemy of Jesus he will be so with an 
inevitable constraint. In the order of ideas, to sum 
up, Christ is more than great; he is incommen- 
surable. 

In the order of actual facts he shrinks almost 
to nothingness. When the believer tests him by 
the light of his time and country he is singularly 
reduced in measure. Such a test can be made by 
any one granted the requisite honesty, the refusal 
to be dazzled by preconceived ideas. 

In considering Jesus as an historic person, the 
first difficulty one encounters is the total absence 
of all references to him in the writings of contem- 
poraries even of his own race. The best informed 


14 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


of them, Josephus, might have mentioned him, but 
refrained from doing so, ostensibly because Jo- 
sephus had never heard of him. To the early Chris- 
tians this anomaly appeared so regrettable that 
Christian hands added to the text of Josephus a 
celebrated passage which he who runs may read. 
Sandwiched naively between an account of the 
cruelties of Pilate toward the Jews and one of their 
banishment from Rome by Tiberius, occurs the 
following: 


‘c, . Thus ended the revolt. And at this time 
appeared Jesus, a wise man if indeed he can be 
called aman. He accomplished marvelous things, 
was the master of men who receive the truth gladly, 
and drew many Jews and Greeks after him. He 
was the Christ. And the sect which received the 
name of Christian from him still exists. 

“In the same days another terrible misfortune 
fell on the Jews. .. .” 


Never was a pious fraud introduced with less 
cunning. Had Josephus written that, it is obvious 
that he would have been a Christian, and as he 
was not a Christian, it is obvious that he did not 
write it. 

Among the Gentile contemporaries of the his- 
toric Jesus are Pliny the Younger, Tacitus and 
Suetonius. All three have mentioned him, but only 
vaguely, and from hearsay, as the founder of an 
obscure and toublesome sect. 


JESUS 15 


There remain, believers will tell us, the four 
Gospels as irrefutable witnesses to the fact that 
Jesus was historic. They are considered as having 
been written by eye-witnesses of Christ’s ministry; 
two of the writers are said to have been his imme- 
diate followers. Unfortunately, it is no longer easy 
to believe that the writers of the Gospel were eye- 
witnesses or immediate disciples. The Gospels 
were not even begun till after the first Christian 
age was over. The oldest of them was written at 
least twenty years after the Letters of Saint Paul. 
Only by faith can we accept the authenticity of 
the Gospels, or even the authenticity of a single 
line of them.* 

The thing which renders the Gospels so suspect 
to critics of revealed Christianity is not so much 
the element of inconsistency or improbability, the 
element of miracle; it is the striking parallelism 
between the drama of the Incarnation as set forth 
therein and certain Hebrew texts composed before 
the Christian era and familiar to us in the Old 
Testament. The Scripture has a way of getting 
fulfilled in the most suspiciously convenient man- 
ner. The most trivial events are constantly occur- 
ring for no reason except to corroborate the 
Prophets. It is a case of the long arm of coinci- 
dence on a vast and sacred scale. Thus Jesus 
enters Jerusalem seated on an ass because he had 


* “T should not believe in the Gospels,” said Saint Augustin, gr iy 
did not have the authority of the Church for doing so.’ 


16 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


already been so seen in the Book of Zachariah. He 
is sold for thirty pieces of silver, this being the 
sum mentioned in the same Prophet. Moreover, 
this money is used, both in Prophecy and Gospel, 
for the same purpose—to buy a potter’s field. 
They part his garments in Matthew, having al- 
ready parted them in the twenty-second Psalm. 
It is useless to multiply these instances; they are 
too numerous. Sometimes the pious writer goes so 
far as to put into Christ’s mouth expressions which 
are textually identical with words composed for 
the Prophecies or the Psalms centuries before.* 

Such instances are sufficient to indicate that the 
Evangelists had only to arrange in narrative form 
the touching drama found all ready for use in the 
sacred literature of their nation. As for the Fourth 
Gospel it only serves to show how their efforts, full 
of inconsistencies and naivetés, could be corrected 
and synthesized by a cultivated Greek theologian 
with the gift of style. 

But (it may be said) Jesus must have existed 
historically, else why the relatively realistic por- - 
trait of him in the Gospels, a portrait possessing 
recognizable human characteristics and bearing a 
human name? To this question the foremost 
critics of Christ’s historicity are ready with several 
ingenious explanations. The latter fall into two 
classes, but one and the other are alike based upon 


* The whole drama of the Passion seems constructed on the sce- 
nario, so to speak, of Psalm XXII. 


JESUS 17 


the alleged existence of a pre-Christian myth of 
Christ which the first organizers of Christianity 
had only to add in order to crown the dubious 
edifice they had already begun. 

(1) The German scholar, Kalthoff, following 
the indications already laid down by Bauer, postu- 
lated the existence at Rome of two elements mak- 
ing for social revolution in a religious disguise— 
the Gentile proletariat and the Jewish Messianic 
movement with its old hope of a Savior to redeem 
Israel. The feeling which had provoked the re- 
volt under the gladiator, Spartacus, in 74 B.c. had 
never changed, but its chiefs knew by hard experi- 
ence that it was useless to oppose themselves to 
the disciplined force of the legions, hence they were 
biding their time, and in so doing they found a 
stimulus in the aspirations of the Jews. Israel 
had known well, during several centuries, the 
proper attitude to adopt in the face of oppression, 
namely, that of passive resistance which sometimes 
leads to emancipation. In short, according to 
Kalthoff, Christianity issued from a social move- 
ment, anterior to the Gospels, anterior also to the 
touching figure which it created expressly to incar- 
nate its own obscure sufferings and aspirations. 

(2) The second theory explaining the inven- 
tion of Jesus is more fascinating, and is largely the 
work of three Anglo-Saxon scholars, Robertson, 
Benjamin Smith and Arthur Drews. ‘The last 
considers Jesus (Joshua) to have been a Pales- 


18 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


tinian sun god taken over bodily by the first Chris- 
tians, and transformed by them into the human 
personage presented to us in the Gospels. His 
myth is entirely cosmopolitan; it owes much to 
Jewish sources, but also to Greek and even to 
Egyptian ones. He is Hermes, the good messenger 
and good shepherd; he is also the demigod Jason 
(The Greek name for Jesus) who has twelve com- 
panions; above all he is Adonis, for Christianity 
makes its first notable successes in that region of 
Asia Minor where the lover of Venus was already 
adored with strange and poetic rites. When Christ 
proclaims in the Apocalypse that he is alpha and 
omega he tells us simply that he is Adonis, for the 
two letters A and O express the name of this god. 
Bethlehem, the Savior’s reputed birthplace, was a 
seat of the Adonaic cult. But the true back- 
ground of the Christ-legend is the great solar myth 
which, from the beginning, dominated the religious 
imagination of the Orient. The entire history of 
the Savior, the Son of God made man, is nothing 
but the long voyage of the sun through the zodiac 
from his birth in the winter solstice to his death and 
resurrection in the Spring. If further proof were 
needed that Christianity in its origins was merely 
a synthesis of pre-Christian myths, it may be added 
that the Egyptian sun-god Horus was also born of 
a virgin, announced by a star, recognized at the 
age of thirty, contended with Satan on a mountain, 
fished with a miraculous net, fed the multitude 


JESUS 19 


with seven loaves, summoned twelve apostles, and 
was called the Good Shepherd, the Lamb, etc. 
These and similarly destructive conclusions 
have been made a hundred times, but, strange to 
say, even the most radical of those scholars who 
do accept the historicity of Jesus have persisted 
in a supplementary conclusion which does not 
necessarily hold water. This can best be summed 
up in the words of Loisy, who confessed that “in 
the year 1894 he was able to accept only one por- 
tion of the Christian creed, namely, that one Jesus 
had been crucified under Pontius Pilate.” That at 
least was certain according to M. Loisy. Ex- 
panded a little, this means that he, the most thor- 
ough and uncompromising of biblical critics, 
believed in 1894 that in the first part of the princi- 
pate of Tiberius an obscure Jewish agitator did 
make sufficient stir as to suffer death under Roman 
law. Armed with this hypothesis, the celebrated 
Ernest Renan wrote a picturesque realistic novel 
still well known as La Vie de Jesus which is not 
half so much the history of Jesus as it is the history 
of Renan. The Jesus of the great Frenchman is a 
Syrian aristocrat who seems singularly conversant 
with the moral and political problems of 1863. He 
would have been very much at home at the fireside 
of Michelet or in the salon of Madame Sand. It is 
magnificent but it zs art, and illustrates the un- 
deniable superiority of art over nature. Others in 
our day have added a Marxian color to the fairy 


20 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


story. Two Americans, Bouck White and Upton 
Sinclair, have, I am sure with sincere conviction, 
given us a Jesus who shares in all the political 
preoccupations of Mr. Eugene V. Debs. 

And all these people, whether skeptics or social- 
ists, are working from a conception which is, from 
the standpoint of facts and proofs, so much thin air. 
There is not a scrap. of evidence, in any accepted 
sense of the word, to justify the common concep- 
tion of an historic Jesus. It is not even enough to 
say with Loisy: “I know nothing of him save that 
he existed.”” One must say courageously: I know 
nothing of him, not even his existence. There is 
no document which proves positively, I will not say 
that he was God, but even that he was ever man. 

That is the initial problem which, if not stated 
and faced, renders any history of the Church which 
he founded incomplete and almost unnecessary. 
How is it that an obscure Jew, the very existence of 
whom is questionable, has been transformed into 
the alpha and omega of medieval history, the great 
god of the Occident? 


The foregoing should be read merely as an exposition of the case against 

the existence of the historic Christ. Jt does not represent the author’s own opin- 
ion, which will become quite obvious if the reader is so patient as to continue 
the book. It is his belief that the approach to Christ can never be made through 
dates and documents, since there are none of a thoroughly satisfactory nature. 
The edition of Josephus recently discovered in Russia may contain insertions fully 
as misleading as the one quoted above. 
_ In this connexion it is only fair to add the orthodox Catholic position regard- 
ing the testimony of the four Gospels. The Church holds that the Gospels are 
genuine historical documents, (2) that they contain no substantial emendations 
of geeey (3) that they prove not only the historicity but also the divinity 
0 esus. 


CHAPTER II 
PAUL 


Tue Letters of Saint Paul form the earliest 
testimony we possess to the existence of Christian- 
ity. They have a start of at least twenty years on 
even the first of the four Gospels. 

Their author was, at any rate, an historic person, 
that is to say, we have as much positive informa- 
tion regarding him as we have regarding Shake- 
speare, which, to be sure, is not a great deal. In 
the year 51-52 a.p., Claud being Emperor, L. 
Junius Gallio, Seneca’s brother, being procurator 
of Achaia, a man calling himself Paul addressed 
to the Christians of Thessalonica a letter which is 
the oldest extant document in which the name of 
Jesus occurs. It occurs side by side with the name 
of God. 

“Paulus . . . to the assembly of Thessalonicans 
in God our Father and the Lord Jesus, the Christ. 

? 

This grammatical relationship between God and 
Jesus is reasserted more forcibly a little later on: 

“May He our God and our Lord Jesus direct our 


way toward you... .” 
21 


22 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


The absence of a plural form in the English sub- 
junctive makes for ambiguity, but there is no am- 
biguity in the Greek.* The verb “direct” remains 
singular, indicating that its substantive is not two 
persons but one person. In the vocabulary of Paul 
God and Jesus do not make a plural; God and Jesus 
are one. 

Paul is writing two decades, at the very most, 
after the Crucifixion. Yet this God-Man of his 
by whom all things were made, belongs evidently 
to a far different order of ideas from the obscure 
Hebrew agitator whose real existence is guaranteed 
us by M. Loisy. 

Of course the deification of a man, even during 
his lifetime, was nothing new in 52 A.p. It was in 
that year or thereabouts that the Empress Agrip- 
pina induced the senate to confer godhead upon her 
husband Claud, a poor lymphatic creature who 
never opened his mouth except to talk nonsense. 
Deified men were as common as thieves in Asia 
Minor; they very often were thieves. 

But there was one nation at least where the thing 
was impossible, and that was among the Jews. 
They had a unique God, Yahveh, a god formless, 
indivisible, whose image they dared not trace, 
whose very secret name they dared not invoke. To 


* Paul, of course, wrote in Greek. We have, moreover, the high 
authority of Mr. H. G. Wells that his Greek was very good. 


PAUL 23 


associate with that awful deity, still more to iden- 
tify with Him, a human being was to the Hebrew 
mind the last abomination. No one has ever been 
more venerated by his people than Moses, but as 
someone has said, the Jews would have suffered 
themselves to be hacked to pieces rather than admit 
that Moses was a god. Their long expected Savior 
was reckoned to come from the household of David; 
he was not, and could not be, the Son of the Most 
High. 

Paul was a Jew. More than that, he belonged by 
origin to the strictest of Jewish sects. And that is 
the supreme miracle beside which the ones in the 
Gospel are bagatelles. In his Letters he is speaking 
of another Jew, living in flesh and blood, a few 
years before, whom he, Paul, might have known. 
And this second Jew, having a human name, as 
common in 52 a.p. as it is to-day in the Mexican 
Bad Lands,— 


“E:xisted in the form of God, 

But drew no advantage from being the 
equal of God. 

He emptied himself, 

And took upon him the form of a slave, 

And was made in the likeness of men. . . 

Therefore God hath highly exalted him, 

And given him a name above all other 
names; 


24 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


That at the name of Jesus every knee 
should bow, 

Of things in heaven, 

And things in earth, 

And things under the earth, 

And that every tongue should confess 

That Jesus Christ is Lord, 

To the glory of God the Father. . . .” 


Let him explain, who can, how a monotheist from 
the most monotheistic people in history, a Jewish 
tentmaker of Cilicia, dared to apply these tremen- 
dous words to his contemporary, a Jewish adven- 
turer of Galilee. The intellectual energy of scholars 
has been wasted for centuries upon dates and mira- 
cles, but I fail to see that they have so much as 
touched the enigma of Paul’s conversion which 
seems to me the crux of the whole Christian prob- 
lem. 

For it is an enigma—this deification of a Jew by 
another Jew—an unsurmountable enigma, un- 
less ee 

Unless we choose to accept the orthdox account, 
and ascribe the conversion of Paul and his organi- 
zation of the Catholic Church to a direct experi- 
ence. If we do so accept it, the metaphysic and 
philosophy which Paul gave the infant Church in 
the name of Jesus becomes credible, almost ra- 
tional. That metaphysic and philosophy, the super- 


PAUL 25 


structure, so to speak, of Christianity we will 
consider in the next chapter. For the moment it 
is enough to point out one fact. Hardly ever does 
Paul evoke eye witnesses or circumstantial evi- 
dence to corroborate the positive creed he is 
preaching in the name of Jesus Christ. One could 
read through the Epistles from cover to cover and 
scarcely be reminded a single time that Jesus 
actually existed in time and space a few years 
earlier. ‘‘What difference does it make,” says Paul 
in effect, “whether Jesus was or was not? Jesus zs. 
What are the odds whether he was the son of Mary 
or the son of Joseph, or the ‘son’ of David or even 
the Son of God! He zs God. And the proof that 
he is God is uniquely in that flash of illumination 
which blinded me on the road to Damascus, in that 
voice, never heard perhaps on Galilean land or 
sea: ‘I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.’ ”’ 

I have not made myself clear thus far if I have 
failed to indicate that the shoulders of Jesus, as 
he is commonly seen by well-meaning modernists, 
are far too frail to have borne even the crushing 
witness of Paul’s Letters, let alone the weight of 
the whole Christian fabric. It is not a mere man, 
the obscure proletarian of M. Loisy or the accom- 
plished Hegelian of Renan or the reasonable com- 
munist of Mr. Bernard Shaw, who can explain the 
fact of the Catholic Church, or even the fact of 
Paul. It is to put a very low estimate on the 


26 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Christian faith to regard it as the mere progressive 
deification of a man, especially a man whose very 
existence cannot be proved. Either Jesus was the 
living God, as he was experienced in trance by his 
chief Apostle, or he is nothing. Either we must see 
him with the eyes of faith, or he is inconceivable. 


CHAPTER ITI 
DOWN TO EARTH 


It was Paul who gave the Church its doctrine, 
its philosophy. This he promulgated up and down 
Asia Minor in rapid and repeated journeys to 
Jerusalem, Macedon, classic Hellas at Athens, 
where he preached on the Acropolis, and finally 
to Rome, where he disappears from history. The 
last word we have of him is from the entertaining 
author of The Acts of the Apostles who recounts 
with a capital bourgeois touch that “he dwelt two 
years in his own hired house and received all that 
came in to him.” It is probable that he perished 
in the first imperial persecution of Christians under 
Nero. Roman Catholics venerate him as one of 
the two apostolic organizers of the Church at 
Rome, and have erected a stately church, still out- 
side the walls, on the site of his supposed execution. 

Paul has been reproached by certain non- 
Christian writers for deforming the thought of 
Jesus, for compressing in an iron theology the joy- 
ous and divine moderation of the Gospels. Two 
men of genius, Mr. Shaw and Mr. George Moore, 


better equipped as romantic artists than qualified 
27 


28 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


as scholars, have taken a special delight in denounc- 
ing this pretended opposition between ‘Chris- 
tianity”’ and the religion of Paul. But, as we have 
shown, there is no opposition at all in the sense that 
they mean, since the only authority we have for 
what Jesus actually thought is in the Gospels, and 
the latter are posterior to the Letters of Paul by 
at least two decades. . The Gospels are an after- 
thought, a narrative commentary embroidered on 
the bold metaphysic of Paul; the latter cannot be 
said to contradict what did not previously exist. 

Only the barest outline can be given here of the 
Christian philosophy as formulated by Paul in his 
apocalyptic manner. He was one, he said, who 
owed much to the barbarian_and also to the Greek, 
and there is more of the former than. the latter in 
his prose. 

The essence of the Pauline theology is contained 
in certain articles later called “the symbol of the 
Apostles,” and still later expanded into the Nicene 
Creed. 


I believe in God... 

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of 
OU) eer. 

Who for us men and for our salvation, 

Came down from heaven, 

And was incarnate by the Spirit of the 
Virgin Mary, 


DOWN TO EARTH 29 


And was made man. 

He was crucified for us under Pontius 
Pirates as 

And the third day he rose again... . 


The first four strophes, at any rate, would have 
been corroborated by Paul. They summarize well 
enough the radiating fact in his theology—the 
voluntary action on the part of a God-Man which, 
in some mysterious fashion, “saved” man. 

When we ask from what occult doom or blight 
we have been delivered centuries before our proper 
existence, we encounter little in modern religious 
teaching which is able to enlighten us. The 
Church, for the most part, has been content to state 
the Redemption as a formula without attempting to 
justify it as a reality. Most people feel neither 
the consciousness of having been saved, nor for that 
matter, any particular need of salvation. They are 
misled on one side by the credulity of M. Loisy and 
on the other by the formalism of their religious 
teachers. Having been told by the latter that they 
have been “saved” (it doesn’t much matter from 
what) they are then informed by M. Loisy and his 
friends that this salvation took place in Palestine 
under the principate of Tiberius at precisely three 
o’clock in the afternoon. After that there is only 
one obvious retort to be made by the man in the 
street: “What has it to do with me? It was before 


30 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


I was born.”” But the man in the street does not 
realize, with Saint Paul, nineteen centuries before 
Einstein, that, so far as God is concerned, time does 
not exist. 

And then there is the instinct called the universal 
human conscience which has assailed the insensi- 
bility even of the man in the street. One thing 
at least the practice of psychoanalysis has accom- 
plished; it has restored “original sin” to more than 
its original place in the drama of the human soul. 
A few years ago this quaint doctrine was relegated 
to the limbo of horsehair Calvinism. Now, thanks 
to the studies of Dr. Freud and his disciples, 
original sin has been revealed as something so much 
more ghastly in its nature and devastation than 
man’s first disobedience and its fruit, that even 
quite soft and voluptuous people will allow them- 
selves to be crucified mentally in secret clinics for 
years at a time in order to get rid of it. People 
feel that Calvinists are inhuman because they con- 
demn little children to damnation before they are 
born, and so they are inhuman, Calvinists being, in 
this respect, quite modern and nicely scientific in 
their trend. In a word, they are not Christians, but 
determinists. Christians know that little children 
are condemned, sometimes prenatally, and so do 
psychoanalysts. But neither condemn them for- 
ever; the psychoanalyst believes in the efficacy 
of his processes plus the human will; the Christian 


DOWN TO EARTH 31 


adds the love and the grace of God. When we 
realize this proposition we can understand how 
singularly modern are Paul’s metaphysics; how 
they square with the most recent and intelligent 
human experience. Mr. Shaw says that Paul’s 
trouble was sex, but a greater than Mr. Shaw has 
shown us that in this obsession Paul is not alone. 
Whatever the Apostle meant by the “sin” from 
which the action of Christ has presumably saved 
us, it corresponded to something not only in his 
consciousness, but also in everyone’s. 

Toward the middle of the eighteenth century 
Rousseau muddled this issue, which is perfectly 
clear and self-evident, by introducing an airy affir- 
mation to the effect that everyone is born good. 
Rousseau who, of all people in the world, should 
have understood frustration, ascribed ‘‘man’s first 
disobedience and his fall” to poverty or ill-health 
or clothes or the government of Louis Quinze. To 
us this romanticism has all the faded charm of an 
old print or a lost cause. The children of our time 
are at least wise enough in their generation to have 
become quite Pauline in their point of departure; 
it is only their diverging paths which are so widely 
asunder. We are desperately wicked, or desper- 
ately miserable (which amounts to the same 
thing), because, as Paul would have said, we have 
not put off the old Adam which clothed us when 
we were born, and even before. Both the Chris- 


32 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


tian and the Freudian are united in believing that 
this original evil can be overcome, stripped from 
the being like a garment. But the Freudian pre- 
fers a succession of tortuous-mental crucifixions, 
and the Christian benefits (perhaps without com- 
prehending) by the crucifixion of Christ. It is 
only the Calvinist who is so impressed by the pre- 
natal flaw, justly called original sin, that he ends 
by denying altogether the valor of the human will 
cooperating with the grace of God. 

This grace, in the Christian scheme of things, is 
conveyed in various ways, but most essentially in 
a process of which Paul gives the following sum- 
mary: 


I received of the Lord 

And deliver it to you; 

That the Lord Jesus the night in which he 
was betrayed, 

Took bread, 

And blessing it broke it, 

And said: Take, eat; this is My Body 
which is broken for you. | 

Do this 

In remembrance of Me.* 


The redeeming action of Christ, perpetuated in 
the timeless sacrifice of the Mass, seems to me the 
basis of the whole Christian theology from which 

* Cora! one 


DOWN TO EARTH 33 


all the rest logically, and for the most part reason- 
ably, proceeds. 


It was not until a period comprised between the 
year 80 and the year 135 that the Gospels were at 
length composed. It does not matter much which 
of them came first. The first three, usually called 
the Synoptic Gospels, had among their sources a 
kind of anthology of Christ’s sayings and parables 
handed on from one to another obscure evangelist.* 
The Gospel of John, written by a very different 
sort of man and for a different milieu, seems deeply 
affected by the Neoplatonic theology which flour- 
ished at Alexandria. It is thought by several 
scholars to be a Gnostic book edited by Catholic 
hands. 

In the Gospels, the ineffable being, hypostasis 
of the one God, who haunted the imagination of 
Paul, becomes at last the “lean and strenuous’’ per- 
sonality who has supplied Messrs. Shaw, Moore and 
Wells with so many and conflicting conjectures. 
The redemption of mankind is considered to have 
taken place in Palestine about forty years prior to 
the destruction of Jerusalem. By the middle of 
the second century the Gospels have been accepted 
by the Catholic cult as the one authentic witness to 
the historicity of its founder, and are cited by 


*Known as Q from the initial letter of the German word Quelle 
(source). 


34 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


St. Justin Martyr as the “memoirs of the 
Apostles.” 

By a sort of caprice, the full significance of: 
which is not clear, the early Church accepted, as an 
authoritative canon, four records of Christ’s exist- 
ence only, thereby rejecting several others which 
contain matter fully as interesting as anything to 
be found in Matthew or Mark. Sentences like the 
following from a lost Hebrew Gospel are finer than 
much in the Synoptics:— 

“Whosoever grieves the spirit of his brother com- 
mits the greatest sin.” 

“The seeker shall not rest till he find that which 
he seeks, but when he has found it, he shall wonder, 
and when he has wondered, he shall be master and 
when he is master, he shall find rest.” 

Whether they be memoirs or retrospective 
‘“‘prophesyings,” the Gospels have a_ sovereign 
charm which no one with the slightest feeling for 
human character or language can ignore. ‘The 
Spirit, third Person of the Trinity, who is believed 
to have inspired them, must also be that deity who 
presides at the genesis of all living art. The Fourth 
Gospel, in particular, containing the opening ode 
to the Logos, the poem of the Good Shepherd, the 
matchless prayer of Jesus at the Last Supper, is a 
work, in certain respects, unsurpassed in world 
literature. 

Only it is necessary to take the Gospels for what 


DOWN TO EARTH 35 


they are, that is as testimony written long after 
a postulated event. There was a Christian society, 
a church in existence before its members conceived 
the idea of inscribing their papers of identification. 
To regard the Gospels as the point of departure will 
involve one in all sorts of inextricable confusions; 
there lies the road to error, Protestantism, heresy, 
what you will, and the end of it all is the mere pret- 
tiness of M. Renan or the icy negations of 
M. Loisy. Christ was conceived as a god by the 
founders of the faith long before its evangelists 
defined him as an historic man. He is a god hu- 
manized; not a man deified. He is the climax of a 
long work of generation in the minds of men, com- 
mencing as early as the feudal age in Egypt and 
culminating at last in the explosion of mystical 
experiences of which the conversion of Paul is only 
one. He is not so much the initiator of a cult as 
the object of acult. He is not the preacher but the 
God preached. He is not the marabout; he is 
Allah. The Gospels are not the departure of this 
mythos; they are the faulty completion of it. 

Christ was a spiritual being, and was so regarded 
by the Church till the propagation of the Gospels 
as historic memoirs. I do not attempt to discuss 
here the nature of spiritual beings. The history 
of the Church is all I can undertake at this time. 
It is in a sense His history also, for He has no other 
definitive biography. 


CHAPTER IV 
ORGANIZATION 


Ir used to be a common standpoint among 
agnostics of a fanciful and determined type, the 
organization of the primitive Church being so 
veiled in uncertainty, that it was, on the whole, 
simpler (and more annoying to the orthodox) to 
assert that the primitive Church had no organiza- 
tion at all. This was often said; it is still said; 
and there was a time when I believed it myself. 
The position of such critics was summarized in 
language something like this: — 

The Catholic Church did not spring into being 
fully accoutered like Minerva from the head of 
Jove. Jesus, its reputed founder, was an ignorant 
Syrian artisan who merely developed a Messianic 
monomania, never imagining that he would be later 
taken up as the head of a new religion. He was 
killed before he even conceived of organizing his 
followers into a definite sect. These followers, act- 
ing on his assurance that he would come again dur- 
ing their lifetime, did, however, form a loose sort 
of fraternal society, rather like the Ethical Culture 


Movement, and indulged in an orgy of revivalism, 
36 


ORGANIZATION 37 


inspirational teaching, social service, and sweetness 
and light in general. There was no hard-and-fast 
government, and, of course, no sacraments in the 
later significance of the term. Naturally, dissen- 
sions rose among the various culturists calling 
themselves Christian, and it was only by luck, or, 
rather, by a wave of snobbery, that the sect denomi- 
nated Catholic rose to a position in which it could 
exterminate its rivals. An oriental Cesar selected 
the Catholic cult as a kind of palace-pet, imposed 
it by force upon the decadent Roman world as a 
State-Church, and killed off its competitors. It 
then fortified its position by inventing various pious 
prevarications; apostolic succession and the pri- 
macy of the pope and this and that sacramental 
mystery cribbed from the Greeks; and thus was 
equipped for its short-lived domination over men’s 
wills and affections during the dark Middle Ages. 
Take it or leave it, this version; it contains, at 
any rate, a plausible sequence of events which the 
orthodox version utterly fails to provide. The 
latter smacks too much of the miraculous element, 
and miracles have nothing to do with history. 
Since I fully agree with this last sentence I pro- 
pose to show that nothing could be more miraculous 
than the version of the Church’s origin I have just 
summarized tested in the light of source and record, 
to say nothing of human probabilities and common 
sense. This chapter will necessarily be the dullest 


38 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


of my narrative, since it involves an immense 
amount of digging and delving into records to 
please the people who are enormously impressed 
by such things as dates and documents. And hav- 
ing no talent for conjecture or controversy, I may 
be pardoned by the reader if I stick to the barest 
outline of facts. In attacking so plausible a posi- 
tion as the one above outlined, plausibility, indeed, 
is not enough. The position is simple and logical 
and complete and all things in fact, but one, and 
that is it is not true. 

In principio erat Verbum. To begin with the 
beginning, then, the undoubted founder of Chris- 
tianity was Christ. It seems an obvious enough 
truism, but to hear many people, one would sup- 
pose the founder of Christianity to have been 
Saint Peter or Paul of Tarsus or the Life-Force or 
the Will to Believe or some unknown Essene monk. 
A great deal of far-fetched patter has been talked 
concerning the religion of Jesus and the religion 
about Jesus. It is the trump card in the popular 
Modernist pack, the religion of Jesus being any- 
thing you happen to like in the Gospels, and the 
religion about him a Pauline corruption, anti- 
Jesuist, anti-Christ. One cannot open a book by 
some highly accomplished moralist like Mr. Shaw 
or Mr. H. G. Wells without being reminded that 
Christ never intended to found anything, most 
certainly not the Church afterward organized in 


ORGANIZATION 39 


hisname. An individualist par excellence, he came 
to save individuals by a highly impractical system 
of personal morality based upon love. Attractive 
as this theory is, it does not square with the figure 
of Christ as presented in the Gospels, and I sup- 
pose that no one would deny that the Gospels are 
records, however tardy and obscure. I myself 
have dismissed them as useless in any discussion of 
Christ as a historic personage. Once grant, how- 
ever, that Christ did live, and the Gospels at once 
become interesting as showing us what early 
Christians thought about him and what elements 
of his teaching they put into regular practice. 
They are not, in short, the first link in the chain, 
but they are a link and a highly important one. 

In the Gospels the word “church” (ecclesia) is 
employed twice by Christ, the first time in the cele- 
brated commission to Peter: “Thou art Peter, and 
upon this rock I will build my Church, and the 
gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”” In the 
Gospels, Christ is represented as providing for the 
extension of his Church, first by sending out his 
twelve elect as missionaries, then by sending 
seventy converts on the same mission. Say that 
all this is fraudulent interpolation, and one is still 
faced with the improbability that even an unbal- 
anced young Nazarene dervish, anticipating an im- 
pending death and an early end of the world, would 
not lift a finger to propagate his illusions as exten- 


40 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


sively and effectively as possible before the evil 
days. At all events this is what happened. Chris- 
tianity appears to have existed already in north 
Palestinian centers, like Antioch and Cesarea 
when, on the disappearance of their master, Peter 
and his comrades found themselves the nucleus of 
a Christian church at Jerusalem. 

The Apostles do not exactly overwhelm the on- 
looker with the spiritual fascination and charm 
which emanated from Jesus, and, consequently, Te 
Acts of the Apostles, the document which continues 
the Christian story where the Gospels leave it off, 
strikes one as an anti-climax up to the moment 
when both matter and style are heightened into 
drama by the apparition of Paul. The Jerusalem 
Apostles seem to have been simple and inferior men, 
for the most part, slow, unimaginative and rou- 
tineer. But it is absurd to say, with Mr. Shaw, 
that the Apostles, on being left to themselves, can- 
celed Jesus and went back to John the Baptist, 
and a glance through the Gospels is enough to 
establish the absurdity. When Christ commands 
his elect to go out and convert all nations by a 
symbolic ceremony of initiation by water, the 
Apostles, in continuing this first precept, can hardly 
be said to be canceling Christ. When, the night 
before his death, he takes bread and wine, informs 
his Apostles that these things contain his divinity, 
and commands them to continue this rite in his 


ORGANIZATION 41 


memory, they cannot be canceling him in so con- 
tinuing it. When Christ says to them plainly: 
““Whosoever’s sins ye remit they are remitted,” and 
they take him at his word, the consequent practice 
of absolution may be superfluous or morbid or ab- 
surd or anything you like, but it cannot, by any 
stretch of imagination, be called un-Christian. For 
the benefit of those who say, in the face of this 
evidence, that sacraments were unknown in the 
early Church and imitated, only much later, from 
popular Greek mysteries, I may state that the three 
described above as found in the Gospels are, in 
their order, the Catholic Sacraments of Baptism, 
the Mass and Confession. 

I have named three major Sacraments of the 
Church, and must now mention a fourth, since upon 
this last is based the whole organization which is 
the central subject of this chapter. If the world 
were not to end for a while, it was obvious to the 
first Christians that the Church must go on, and if 
the Church were to go on, the Sacraments must con- 
tinue to operate at the hands of people as qualified 
to operate them as the Apostles themselves. It was 
considered that when Christ employed the second 
person pronoun he was speaking, not only to Peter 
or John, as the case might be, but also to a whole 
multitude of successors through the ages, the 
mystical body to which he had promised the gift 
of his Holy Spirit. Consequently, the Sacrament 


42 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


of Orders (Apostolic Succession) seems to have 
been employed right and left at Jerusalem and else- 
where. Immediately after Christ’s disappearance, 
the Apostles “laid their hands” upon a certain 
Matthias to replace the traitor Judas as one of the 
Twelve, indicating that they, at least, regarded 
themselves as a central organization, whatever the 
modern critic thinks that they were. They then 
ordained seven deacons so that they themselves 
“might not be servers of tables.” Paul, from his 
headquarters at Antioch, ordained presbyters in 
every church that he founded. Thus the Christian 
Church, in its very cradle at Jerusalem, is revealed 
as a body possessing both a sacramental system and 
a hierarchy. The fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. 
transferred the Jerusalem community to Antioch in 
Syria, and in Antioch at the beginning of the sec- 
ond century, as anyone can ascertain for himself 
who troubles to look up the Letters of Saint 
Ignatius (110 A.p.) the modern three-fold order of 
bishops, priests and deacons existed in full force. 
Put the two dates together, and ask whether it is 
so unreasonable to suppose that it existed in 
Jerusalem also. The episcopal and medieval 
Antichrist is seen to be very close, in point of time, 
to the apostolic and primitive Christ. 

“The contagion of this superstition,” wrote Pliny 
two years later, “has penetrated not only the cities 
but also the villages and countryside.” One must 


ORGANIZATION 43 


imagine the eastern Mediterranean as a long lake 
with three visible shores, the Hellenic-Latin cities 
facing each other across the water. By the second 
century the new faith from Palestine had radiated 
in two principal directions, striking south and west 
along the coast of Egypt as far as Carthage; north 
and west through Syria and the Cilician Gates 
where, carried by Paul, it crossed the A‘gean inlet 
to Hellas, and thence across a second inlet, the 
Ionian one, to Italy and the capital of the world. 
This is perhaps the best moment to sketch the 
shadowy origins of the institution known later as 
the Papacy and the Papal Supremacy. Whether 
one likes it or not, it is one of the oldest institutions 
in the Christian world. No sooner do we know 
from Saint Ignatius that one Christian church, by 
presumption a model for the rest, was governed 
by bishops, than we unearth another document, 
slightly earlier, wherein it appears that one of these 
bishops (of Rome) speaks with the accent of 
authority to the rest. I refer to the Letters of Saint 
Clement of Rome (90 a.p.) the Letters, that is, of 
someone who was very nearly a contemporary of 
Christ. His first predecessor as Roman Bishop is 
believed by Catholics to have been Peter who trans- 
ferred himself from Antioch to Rome at some date 
during the principate of Nero (54-68). As for the 
Supremacy, the governance of the Christian world 
by the Bishops of Rome, his successors, it is justi- 


44, STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


fied in two ways, (1) dogmatically, by the commis- 
sion in the Gospel: “Thou art Peter and upon this 
rock I will build my Church,” and (2) historically. 
Among all the primitive Christian centers, Rome, 
as the capital of the civilized world, became, for an 
obvious reason, predominant. As the Church be- 
came more and more identified with the civilized 
world, it was natural that the capital of the latter 
should become also the capital of the Church, and 
that the Bishop of Rome, after the elimination of 
an emperor in the west, should rule both Church 
and world. The force of history thus carried the 
Papacy triumphantly along with an almost geo- 
metric precision. Eventually the Pope took the 
ancient title formerly borne by the Cesars,— 
Pontifex Maximus. It signifies head of the 
Empire’s religion. 

To sum up:—When agnostics speak of a Catholic 
cult contending for survival and supremacy with 
other Christian cults, they may very possibly be 
right, though up to the second century the burden 
of proof is decidedly on them. I merely venture 
to point out that they are wrong in saying that its 
organization cannot be determined, and that its 
sacraments are after-thoughts. By its own defini- 
tion the Christian cult was by 100 A.p. a group of 
churches federated by the same religion taught 
them by Christ seventy years previous; a religion 
involving at least three sacraments, also of Christ’s 


ORGANIZATION ! 45 


precept, and carried on by a clergy in a three- 
fold organization inherited from apostolic times. 
Finally, over all these ancient churches there was 
one figure, primus inter pares, who spoke authori- 
tatively across three seas. 

Early in the second century the personality of 
this Church was compromised by the movement 
known as Gnosticism. 

The Gnostics originated in Alexandria, one of 
the breakwaters where the various mythologies 
from the Orient came to spend themselves against 
the western mind. According to these people, the 
gulf between the infinite and finite, spirit and 
matter, God and man, was bridged by a succession 
of divine emanations called eons. Jesus was one 
of these zons, camouflaged for a few years under 
the likeness of man. [Docetism] Marcion (c. 
160) holding the Docetic view that a phantom 
calling itself Jesus was seen to die on the Cross, 
attempted to Gnosticize the Church from the in- 
side. Like all religions of this character, Gnosti- 
cism was occult and pessimistic. The Fourth Gos- 
pel is thought by-several to be the Catholic edition 
of a Marcionite book. The hidden Wisdom 
(gnosis) was only gradually revealed to the cul- 
tured and prematurely sad, while its adherents 
blasphemed the life of this world by endless de- 
nunciations of matter and sex. The menace in- 
volved in this curious and fashionable superstition 


46 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


consolidated the Catholic cult and stiffened the 
powers of the Episcopate. Synods, church coun- 
cils on a minor scale, were held with increasing 
frequency, and among the faithful there was dis- 
seminated a formula called the Roman symbol or 
Apostles’ Creed. The various scattered churches, 
hitherto conscious of no great need for external 
conformity so long as they were guided by a com- 
mon faith in Christ and certain common practices, 
drew together, and the “great Church,” as its 
enemy, Celsus, calls it in 177, fought Gnosticism 
till it died, or, rather, till it shammed death. 

Well before the end of the second century the 
Christian family took the name Catholic, that is 
to say, international, universal. 

Our agnostic critic of origins can afford to allow 
the above description to pass uncontested, con- 
temptuously reserving his great card, which is that 
the Church eventually became supreme, not be- 
cause it was of divine origin, or even because it 
was sane and holy, but because it was adopted and 
imposed on the world by no less a person than 
Divus Cesar. Whether its ultimate supremacy Is 
really as simply explained as all that, I propose 
to examine in subsequent chapters. 


CHAPTER V 
CHRIST AND CAESAR 


Tue Cesars had always exercised a creditable 
prudence in dealing with conquered minorities. 
Their spiritual descendants, the English (accord- 
ing to the English) have never shown in India or 
elsewhere the consideration of even so hard a func- 
tionary as Pontius Pilate, who kept the golden 
eagles outside the walls of Jerusalem so that they 
might not defile the holy city of the Jews with 
graven images. In a word, the Romans were not 
cursed with the mania of religious uniformity. So 
long as their subjects respected those divinities 
who symbolized the fecund majesty of the Roman 
state, they were free to worship a whole menagerie 
of imported gods, conceived in their own taste, 
and it is just to add that most of them did. Rome 
harbored rhore little religions than the Middle 
West of America, and their manifestations were 
infinitely more picturesque. Christianity itself 
owes its easy introduction into polite society to 
this wholesale eclecticism. The religion of the 


Nazarene was after all only one more, and there 
47 


48 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


might be something in it. Even the emperors, 
official high priests as they were of the Latin cult, 
shared the apprehension of the poet Baudelaire, 
who reproved the hilarity of some friends before a 
hideous and pathetic South Sea idol, saying: 
“Have a care: it might be the unknown God.” 
One act of conformity only was required of the 
alien. As a mark of respect to the visible symbol 
of the great State which protected him, he was 
obliged to salute, usually by offering incense, the 
image of the emperor. It was a gesture hardly 
more significant than a salute to the national flag, 
or than rising to the strains of the Star Spangled 
Banner in a theater. It is perhaps regrettable 
that the Semitic consciences of the first Christians 
did not permit them to concede this small polite- 
ness, for they suffered atrociously as a result of 
not rendering to Cesar the things that were his. 
The first persecution, that under Nero, was, 
however, no fault of theirs. Nero, a cheap mono- 
maniac and a coward, was suspected of having set 
the city on fire to while away the tedium of a 
sultry evening on the Palatine hill. To divert sus- 
picion from himself, he accused the whole Chris- 
tian community, the more indiscreet of whose 
members were always talking about the imminent 
destruction of the world in flames. 
/ From the year 64 to the year 311, when the 
government abandoned the struggle, there was per- 


CHRIST AND CHSAR 49 


secution of the new cult, most of it, however, 
sporadic and local in character. One outbreak 
took place in the Flavian October of the Empire, 
under the gentle skeptic moralist, Marcus Aurelius. 
His beautiful wife Faustine, having given him 
more trouble than all the Christians put together, 
is said to have ended her days in the consoling 
shadow of the Cross. This tradition is interesting 
if only as indicating the progress which the Church 
had then made in the conversion of the upper 
classes. It could no longer be accurately called the 
religion of the poor. 

Walter Pater in his suave philosophic romance, 
Marius the Epicurean, has a poetic description of 
the Mass, the “divine service” as it had thus far 
developed in the Christian assemblies during the 
Minor Peace of the Church under the Antonines. 
It is far too long to quote entire, but certain pas- 
sages are suggestive. 

“It was a sacrifice in its essence—a Sacrifice, it 
might seem, like the most primitive, natural and 
enduringly significant of old pagan Sacrifices of 
the simplest fruits of the earth. . . . Certain por- 
tions of the bread and wine were selected by the 
bishop, and thereafter it was with an increasing 
mysticity and effusion that the rite proceeded. 
Like an invocation or supplication the antiphonal 
singing developed from this point into a kind of 


50 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


solemn dialogue between the chief ministrant and 
the whole assisting company— 


Sursum Corda! 
Habemus ad Dominum. 


Gratias agamus Domino Deo nostro!— 


It was the service especially of young men, stand- 
ing there in long ranks, arrayed in severe and 
simple vesture of pure white—a service in which 
they would seem to be flying for refuge, with their 
youth itself as a treasure in their hands to be 
preserved, to one like themselves whom they were 
also ready to worship. So deep was the emotion 
that at moments it seemed as if some at least 
there present perceived the very object of all this 
pathetic crying drawing near. Throughout the rite 
there had been a growing sense and assurance of 
some one coming. 

Ite! Missa est aa ey young deacons. 

The natural soul of worship had at last been sat- 
isfied as never before.” 

The peace of the Church was rudely disturbed 
by the cruel persecution of Decius and again by 
the advent of the Emperor Diocletian (284) who 
embarked on a life-and-death struggle with the 
strong young faith. If ever a man did his utmost 
to exterminate a hostile force it was Diocletian, a 
Roman of the old school, by no means a con- 


CHRIST AND CHSAR 51 


temptible figure. Thousands perished as a result 
of his supreme effort. Then having divided the 
Empire into West and East, he retired to an 
Horatian farm and spent the remainder of his days 
in cultivating prize vegetables. On his deathbed 
he is said to have acknowledged the futility of the 
persecution. 

An early successor to Diocletian was Constan- 
tine, born in England, on the confines of the Em- 
pire, at York. He was determined, not only to be 
a stronger despot than Diocletian, but also not to 
repeat his capital mistake. Christianity was now 
the religion, secret or acknowledged, of a sixth of 
his subjects, but there was a better reason than 
that for trying it out. The Church was, by this 
time, truly Catholic, in other words, international. 
Since the defeat of Mithraism, it was perhaps the 
one cult in the realm with a justified claim to uni- 
versality. One could hardly do better than to 
bring this religion which worked in every part of 
the Empire under one’s own thumb. Constantine 
admired, too, the system of episcopacy by which, if 
one held a handful of bishops, one held the Church. 
In short, Christianity seemed to him an admirable 
instrument for fortifying and enforcing Roman 
unity. There is a pretty story of his having seen 
the Cross and the words zn hoc signo vinces in the 
clouds above the Milvian bridge on the eve of a 
battle, but he had no need of a vision to reénforce 


52 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


his common sense which already told him that in 
this sign he would conquer. He issued an edict of 
toleration (313). The Pagan cults disappeared, 
to be immediately replaced by the even more fan- 
tastic aberrations of the fourth century heretics. 
The day of Roman toleration was over, and that 
of Roman uniformity had dawned. But in this 
first struggle between Church and State the latter 
had surrendered, only to rule better. 

As early as the reign of Tiberius, the Emperor 
had investigated the report of some sailors cruising 
the Greek islands who heard voices crying along 
the shore, ‘‘Pan is dead.” This time Pan was 
really slain, if imperial edicts could kill him. There 
is good reason to suppose, however, that his death 
was merely feigned. 

The main contention of our Modernist is true 
then? Is it true that the “great Church” became 
a State Church because it was imposed upon the 
Empire as inexorably as conscription? I am afraid 
that the answer to this convenient contention is 
.. . not at all. Christianity was not inexorably 
imposed by Constantine; it was tolerated and 
adopted in a curious halting fashion by the Em- 
peror himself, who only on his deathbed consented 
to be baptized. It was not made obligatory for 
all citizens till the reign of Theodosius and then 
only in the east. It is true that the Pagan cults 
did disappear in an extremely leisurely fashion, 


CHRIST AND CHSAR 53 


but their gradual disappearance was due to the 
force of mode rather than to the mode of force. 
In the generation following Constantine’s, the 
Emperor Julian led a rather pathetic return to 
Paganism, and there is a charming story, which 
Heine would have liked to exploit, of the last 
Pagan Emperor discovering the old priest on the 
steps of a fallen temple with a goose in his lap— 
the only trace of Paganism that Julian could un- 
earth. The Modernist asserts that the Catholic 
cult conquered merely because Divus Cesar 
wrapped his purple cloak about the Crucified. But 
the ink on the edict of toleration was hardly dry 
before the cold and stately shadow of Arius fell 
upon this incongruous group, and Catholic Chris- 
tianity found itself once more in battle, not only 
against a novel and attractive heresy, but against 
principalities and powers, against Divus Cesar 
himself, and, as Athanasius said, against the world. 


CHAPTER VI 
HERESY 


THE Church appears to have suffered from com- 
plicated divergencies within its fold, from heresy 
in short, ever since the first days of the Apostles. 
At a date anterior to his first missionary journey 
(c. 47 a.p.), Paul embarked on a bitter contro- 
versy with the leaders of the Jerusalem Church on 
the problem presented by Gentile converts to 
Christianity. The older Apostles, however much 
or little they were penetrated by the new Gospel, 
remained in their religious life devout Jews. For 
this they could plead the example of their master. 
Jesus, in whatever light one regards him, was ex- 
ternally a Jew; he was circumcized, preached in 
the synagogues, apparently as an _ accredited 
rabbi, worshiped in the Temple, while there were 
even moments when the old lion of the House of 
Judah broke through his divinity, as when he 
rudely told the Syro-Phcenician woman that “‘it 
was not meet to take the children’s bread and 
cast it to dogs,” and was only melted by the beauty 
of her response: ‘‘Truth, Lord, yet the dogs eat 

54 


HERESY 55 


of the crumbs that fall from the Master’s table.” 
His Apostles wished that admittance to the Chris- 
tian cult be made dependent upon the convert’s 
acceptance of circumcision, after which he was to 
be baptized. Paul contended that this surgical 
operation was superfluous for adult Gentiles, and 
the Jerusalem Apostles eventually swung around 
to his side. He thus saved the Church from re- 
lapsing into an annex of the Jewish Temple; it is 
not too much to say that he secured its survival. 
A remnant of irreconcilables lingered on in the old 
Ebionites seen by Flaubert sitting “aged like 
mummies” in desert places and saying: ‘We alone 
have known Him, the carpenter’s Son.” 

But Christianity was oriental in its origin, and 
even after this first triumph over Semitism the ori- 
ental mind did not abandon its passion for non- 
conformity without a struggle. During the third 
century a new sect pullulated every year, almost 
every day. One must go to the delirious pages of 
the Tentation de Saint Antoine for an intimation 
of the myriad and monstrous cults which from the 
right and the left assailed all at once the orthodoxy 
of Rome. Gnosticism which, as we have seen, was 
the first to come, was the first to go, except as it 
survived in the curious Catharism of Albi and the 
French Midi during the Middle Ages. Reinach, in 
general very hostile to Christian orthodoxy, has 
observed that the passing of Gnosticism was a good 


56 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


riddance for the world since its extravagant meta- 
physics were dangerous alike to society and to 
the individual. All one can affirm is that the 
Gnostics took everything that was already obscure 
in Christian theology and proceeded to render con- 
fusion thrice confused. Sophia, who seems to have 
been a sort of celestial daughter-in-law, engendered 
the Demiurge who created the world, the Demon 
and man. Somewhere in this lucid cosmogony 
came Christ and the Holy Ghost, but it does not 
greatly matter where, though there is said to be 
still a Gnostic church with bishops at Paris. The 
Gnostic scheme, if it had one, was broken up, 
but fragments of separate insanity survived 
and took other names. Manes, originally a 
Gnostic, affected by the old Dualism of Persia, 
taught that the creator of matter, who 
was also the Yahveh of the Old Testament, is 
really the Devil. Christ came to establish a king- 
dom of pure spirit and redeem us from his yoke. 
Manes has given his name to the Manichzan cult 
which flourished in southern France well on into 
the Middle Ages when it was put down with fire 
and sword. Montanus, accompanied by two 
women, preached an unnatural asceticism. Donatus 
called down the wrath of heaven upon the Chris- 
tian clergy who had apostasized during the late 
persecutions. His followers, the Circoncellians, a 
sort of Bulgar comitadji, clothed in wolfskins, 


HERESY 57 


crowned with thorns and brandishing whips, ter- 
rorized the African Church and sacked monasteries 
and towns. The Adamites went about completely 
naked in imitation of the lost purity of Eden. The 
Valesians mutilated themselves in hatred of the 
flesh. The Paternians lived in filth in order to 
dishonor their bodies, made, as they conceived, by 
Satan. The Messalians brutalized themselves 
systematically on the ground that all occupation, 
including that of thought, was a sin. 

In this welter of madness, the Church, the 
Roman insignia -on its prow, held its difficult 
course like a ship tossed by opposing waves 
from this side and that, and all but shattered, but 
still enduring. Chesterton, in a characteristic 
passage, compared the Church to a chariot, swerv- 
ing to right and left so exactly as just to avoid 
enormous obstacles. It is always easy to fall, he 
remarks, it is always easy to be a heretic. There 
are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only 
one at which one stands. ‘The heavenly chariot 
flew thundering through the ages; the dull heresies 
sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but 
erect,” 

When the madmen one by one disappeared 
squeaking and gibbering into limbo, they were at 
once replaced by a far more temperate and dan- 
gerous type of heretic—the rationalist theologian. 
Arius was the most influential of these as well as 


58 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


the first. He was a deacon in orders, a good- 
looking and dignified ecclesiastic, much admired by 
women. The great preoccupation of the new 
heretic was with the precise nature of the Word, 
the Logos, the Christ, regarded both by orthodox 
and dissident as the match which had kindled the 
conflagration of Christianity. Was the Logos 
really coequal and coeternal with the Father as 
the Church said? No, replied Arius, He was cre- 
ated by the Father, it doesn’t matter when, in 
time, at all events, and hence He is subordinate 
to the Father. Though far from affirming that 
Christ was merely a man, the tendency of Arianism 
was obviously Socinian. Arius may be regarded as 
the first Unitarian. 

He found considerable support not alone among 
theologians, but among the crowd, especially that 
of recent converts with whom his conception of 
Christ was popular for its resemblance to that of 
the demigod in Pagan myths. Through a series 
of songs which he wrote, like a Byzantine Chaucer, 
“for sailors, wayfarers and millers,’ the Arian 
catchwords ran like wildfire through the lower 
bourgeois and slave classes. It was the first at- 
tempt on the part of a theologian, truly Modernist, 
to subordinate everything in Catholic Christianity 
to the susceptibilities of the man in the street. 
Babbitt was to be made a good Catholic by a 
writing down of the dogmas and paradoxes of the 


HERESY 59 


Faith for Babbitt’s consumption. The most con- 
spicuous leader on the orthodox or Trinitarian side 
was a young deacon of the Church at Alexandria 
named Athanasius. 

In the year 324 the Emperor Constantine inter- 
vened. He himself was not a Christian. Insofar 
as he had any clear religion it was monotheism, 
but it was a worship of the Persian sun-god, 
Mithras, so popular in the army, whose effigy ap- 
peared on Constantine’s coinage till some time 
after the edict of toleration. But the Arian 
schism threatened to upset the Emperor’s dearest 
wish, which was the religious unity of his domin- 
ions. In the struggle between Arian and Catholic 
over the actual character and degree of Christ’s 
divinity he saw nothing but a verbal difficulty 
about nothing, a form of words, as perhaps it 
was. Nevertheless he wished the struggle to cease. 
Accordingly he summoned all the bishops of the 
Church to meet in a first General Council at Nicea 
across the Bosphorus from the capital on the 
nineteenth day of June, 325. 

The Council of Nicea gave the Church the 
Nicene Creed. Hitherto the varying symbols em- 
ployed by scattered churches had all been based 
on the formula quoted in Matthew’s Gospel,* but 


* All power being given me in heaven and earth, go ye and teach 
all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son 
and of the Holy Spirit. 


60 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


from the second century there had been a tendency 
to expand this statement so as to guard the faith 
in the minds of the simple from heretical miscon- 
structions like those of the Gnostics. The assault 
of the latter upon the Church gave the Roman 
symbol, and the Roman symbol, meeting the new 
assault of the Arians, was lengthened into the 
Nicene Creed. 

Athanasius, refusing to accept any creed which 
would include the Arians, held out for the famous 
homoosion (of one essence) with God, a word 
which established the complete divinity of Christ. 
The majority of the Council, though they disliked 
the rigidity of the definition, finally accepted it, 
and declared that those who maintained that there 
was a time when Christ was not, or that He was 
a created being—these the Catholic and Apostolic 
Church declared anathema (condemned). 

One thing remains to be said of the Nicene 
definition, and that is it is wholly incomprehensible. 
If any one doubts this, let him dip into the myste- 
rious waters of the Athanasian Creed, an expansion 
of the Nicene one. 

“Whosoever will be saved,” begins the formula 
reassuringly, “before all things it is necessary that 
he hold the Catholic. faith. 

“Which faith,” the creed continues grimly, “ex- 
cept he do keep it holy and undefiled, without 
doubt he shall perish everlastingly.” 


HERESY 61 


We are then told that Catholics worship one 
God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, which is all 
very well for those to whom elementary mathe- 
matics mean very little, and then comes the crux 
of the problem, whether Christ as God was co- 
eternal or not. Athanasius decides, apparently, 
that he was both at once by the stupefying con- 
clusion that Christ was “begotten” but not “‘cre- 
ated.” (Genitum non factum.) 

Any one who is unable to understand the subtle 
distinction between being begotten and being 
created is invited to betake himself straightway to 
everlasting destruction. 

Arius died suddenly while in a latrine, struck 
down in that undignified posture, said the orth- 
odox, by the judgment of heaven, but it must not 
be imagined that his heresy died with him, blown 
into nothing by the thunders of Athanasius and 
the patronage of the Catholic party under Con- 
stantine. That Emperor died in 337, and his im- 
mediate successors swung around to the popular 
heresy, always very strong in the provinces. It 
was Arianism and not the Church which found 
itself overnight the pet of the purple. Athanasius 
was banished to the Thebaid; Catholic bishops 
were deposed by the government; it was the 
Church which took the dusty road of persecution 
and unpopularity, and that for a long time. For 
a while, indeed, it seemed in danger of extinction. 


62 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Generations passed; the last Latin Emperor, a 
little boy, was lifted from his throne by a shaggy 
barbarian named Odoacer (476), but the Catholic 
Church gained nothing by a change of era that 
seemed to be the end of a world. The Arian 
heresy was eagerly taken up by the new bar- 
barian kingdoms, the ancestors of modern states, 
now rising on the ruins of the Empire, probably 
because those relatively simple minds were unable 
to swallow the mystery that three is the same 
thing as one. Theodoric, Odoacer’s great succes- 
sor in Italy (493-526), was an Arian with all his 
court. The agnostic’s final conclusion that the 
Church only conquered because she was a sort of 
sacred cow Stalled in the comfortable stables of 
emperors and governments is a great deal too 
simple, and it is contradicted by the plain facts of 
history from the Council of Nicea to the baptism 
of the orthodox Franks in 496. I would prefer 
to believe that its survival and ultimate supremacy 
were indeed a miracle, for miracles from heaven 
are often more credible than the foolscap ones 
spun by agnostic historians. No, the Church is 
naturally a rebel against civil governments, and 
has always been so. It was a rebel against the 
Pagan emperors and the Christian ones; a rebel 
against the barbarian kinglets of the dark age and 
the German kaisers of the middle one with their 
mania for meddling, and the Anglo-Norman sov- 


HERESY 63 


ereigns with their craze for bureaucratic efficiency. 
Straight through the maze of medieval and modern 
times, this eternal opposition is manifested like a 
light from Nero to Mussolini. “Render unto 
Cesar the things that are his,’ murmurs the 
Church, echoing the sublime repartee of its foun- 
der, and adding on its own account. . . . “But not 
an inch more.” The instant that the universal 
Church bends to a single nationalism, as in France 
from Avignon to Versailles, it declines in propor- 
tion; when it bends sufficiently low it breaks as in 
Ninety-Three. Rebellion is one of its marks, more 
conspicuous indeed than holiness; it is also its 
chief glory, and it is, in part, to manifest it that 
I have written this book. 

But I am well in advance of my subject. The 
Trinity having been affirmed at Nicea there arose 
Nestorius, who was dissatisfied with the Nicene 
decision on the ground that it made one Person of 
Christ, whereas there should be two, a human and 
a divine. The Council of Ephesus (431) decided 
rightly that this was the merest pedantry, and 
Nestorius withdrew to found Churches in Meso- 
potamia and Persia which actually survive to this 
day. They have probably forgotten the very name 
of Nestorius, but, proud of their antiquity, they 
still hold resolutely aloof both from Rome and the 
Orthodox Church in the East. 

Then appeared Eutchyes who declared that if 


64 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Christ were only one Person, it stood to reason 
that He could have only one nature, namely, a 
divine nature in a human body. This sounded 
plausible enough, but the Church in a- second 
Council of Ephesus (449) decided that it was all 
wrong, and Eutyches in turn withdrew to found 
the Monophysite Churches of Egypt (Copt), 
Abyssinia, Syria (Jacobite) and Armenia, which 
have also survived. The Monophysite heresy was 
a serious one because it obviously resided on some 
basis of good sense. Peacemakers calling them- 
selves Monothelites tried to bridge the gulf be- 
tween orthodox and monophysite by contending 
with the former that, while Christ might have two 
natures, they were united by a single energy or 
will. This compromise sounded so wildly reason- 
able that it gained all sorts of adherents, including 
the eastern Emperor Heraclius, but the Church 
was no longer after reasonable solutions but the 
most arbitrary metaphysics and the most rigid 
definitions. So the poor Monothelites went the 
way of the rest. They founded the Maronite 
Church of the Lebanon range, which during the 
twelfth century was reunited to Rome. ‘Thus the 
most reasonable of the heresies is the only one 
which has had no organized survival. 

Orthodoxy was saved, but in the ninth century 
Rome suffered the most important loss it had yet 
sustained when a great Church, itself orthodox so 


HERESY 65 


far as name could make it, deserted the pope. 
This was the Church of the Greek, or Eastern, 
Empire and included the great patriarchates of 
Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem and Constanti- 
nople. The Christian unity, which the Papal Su- 
premacy itself could not divide, was destroyed by 
a simple grammatical conjunction. The Roman 
Church had declared that the Holy Spirit pro- 
ceeded from the Father and the Son; the Eastern 
Christians could not swallow that “and” which 
seemed to destroy the equality of the Trinity. 
Save for a brief interval, the two Catholic families 
of East and West have remained separated ever 
since. The opponents of the conjunction ‘‘and”’ 
are represented to-day by the national Churches 
of Greece, Russia, the Balkan States and their 
missionary bodies in the Ottoman Republic and 
the Near East in general. 

In, those days certain bishops and holy men 
distinguished themselves by writing against the 
heretics and thus building up and completing the 
edifice of Christian theology. The Popes, in ad- 
dition to canonizing these persons, have honored 
them with the title of Doctor of the Church. 
Among them was Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, whose 
excellent memory still sanctifies the cloisters of 
Sant’ Ambrogio in that city, and Jerome, a violent 
fanatic, who eventually buried his violences in the 
sacred peace of Bethlehem, where he died on holy 


66 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


soil. For us the most celebrated of these intel- 
lectuals is Augustin, Bishop of Hippo, near Car- 
thage, a distinguished example of the Latin genius 
in its decadence. He was the first to give expres- 
sion to the idea which dominated the medieval 
Church during the thirteenth century, namely, 
that it was ordained a divine theocracy to rule 
European society for Europe’s good. “For more 
than a thousand years this idea of the Church as 
a sort of vast amphictyony whose members were 
restrained, even in war, by the idea of a common 
brotherhood and a common loyalty to the Church 
and the Papacy, dominated Europe.” The great 
modern religion which we call nationalism could 
not lift its head so long as men really believed in 
a league of nations subordinate in faith and morals 
to the papal super-state, the Czvitas Dei. This 
ideal saved the world in the days of the barbarian 
anarchy; it was certainly what the world needed 
then; and in our own time of a military capitalism, 
hardly less anarchic, it is what the world needs 
now. 

Augustin is chiefly remembered as the author 
of the poignant and melodious Confessions. The 
latter are doubtless marred by the over-frequent 
outbursts of scriptural ejaculation, but for all that, 
they possess unforgettable passages and phrases. 
The author’s ‘(O God make me chaste, but not 
yet,” is one that for some reason sticks in the 


HERESY 67 


memory. Augustin, for all his exaggerated repu- 
tation for austerity, was one of the most human 
of saints. He was a true psychologist with a pro- 
found and mystical knowledge of the human heart, 
who amid the ruins of civilization and the deepen- 
ing twilight of the dark ages, looked for a city 
having foundations, whose maker and builder is 
God, 


CHAPTER VII 
MONASTICISM 


TuHE only solution for the human soul during 
the dark ages lay in the escape from life. The 
period was an abyss of desolation in which one 
by one all the ancient arts and honors of man 
seemed to disappear. In that twilight of nations 
Italy alone could still be seen by the afterglow of 
the Empire, the last rays of the sun that was 
going down over all the west. Theodoric and his 
Gothic Kingdom at Ravenna struck a final mo- 
mentary gleam,* stamped out by the first Lombard 
ruffian who crossed the border. The heathen bar- 
barism of the west was soon imitated by the 
Christian obscurantism of Byzantium. The East- 
ern Emperor Justinian, who married his mistress 
and became a devout bourgeois, closed the uni- 
versity of Athens. In the meantime, Goths, Van- 
dals, Huns, Lombards and Anglo-Saxons raided 
Europe. The old world seemed to be rushing down 
in an agony of despair and dissolution, and no one 

* See the noble churches at Ravenna and those Byzantine frescoes 


so admired by Clive Bell (Art). 
68 


MONASTICISM 69 


was qualified to say that these torments were 
merely the preliminary throes of a new order, al- 
most a new unity. 

In this painful transition between two ages 
monasticism appeared. Intelligent spirits whose 
religion forbade them to commit suicide took the 
three vows. Monastic vows had been strenuously 
practiced a century before by the hermits of the 
Thebaid who followed Saint Anthony. There is 
no better description of their existence than is 
found in the opening lines of Thats: 

“In those days the desert was full of anchorites. 
On the two banks of the Nile, innumerable cabins 
built of branches were sown at some distance from 
each other so that the solitaries who lived in them 
could dwell isolated and yet aid each other in 
need. . . . Angels similar to young men came to 
visit the hermitages, while demons, disguised as 
Ethiopians or as animals, wandered around the 
solitaries. When the monks went, at morning, to 
fill their pitchers at the fountain, they saw the 
footprints of satyrs and centaurs on the sand. 
Considered under its spiritual and veritable aspect, 
the Thebaid was a battlefield where were deliv- 
ered, at every hour, but especially at night, the 
marvelous combats of earth and heaven.” 

This tension of the ascetic life experienced by 
hermits and solitaries was too strained for the 
free spirits of the west. Saint Benedict (480- 


70 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


543), the practical founder of monasticism in 
Europe, was imbued with the idea that it is not 
well for man to be alone. He enjoined his fol- 
lowers to love God and to live reasonable lives. 
In the mother house of Monte Cassino, the classic 
landscape at his feet, the famous mountains and 
gleaming cities in the distance, he was able to 
synthesize the existence of a patrician, a lover of 
the soil and its old humanities, a very great saint. 
The same mystic experiment was effected by the 
old temples and green cascades of Subiaco, and 
the regula of Benedict spread throughout bar- 
barized Europe, transforming it. It is significant 
that at Monte Cassino Benedict spared a holm of 
primeval oaks in whose shade the Queen of Love 
and Beauty had once been worshiped. 

The Benedictines were often men of action, 
debarred from their natural inclinations by a legit- 
imate disgust for the world. In a Europe given 
up to the most abject anthropophagy, in a Church 
which could barely write her own name, there was 
no place for them but the cloisters. They were 
the aristocrats of the dark ages. It is not enough 
to say that the religious houses were of value be- 
cause, by a kind of miracle, they preserved for us 
Pindar and Plato, Virgil and the Anthology; be- 
cause they unconsciously continued culture. In 
the period extending from the fifth to the eleventh 


MONASTICISM 71 


centuries, they were culture. They were like small 
sunny islands in the universal welter of things. 
Nor were their inmates drones. As soon as they 
had established themselves they set out to re- 
civilize Europe. Benedictines and Carthusians, 
Cluniacs and Cistercians, all heralds of the 
Papacy, make us feel that the Pope, pontifex max- 
imus, was really, and all unknown to himself, the 
authentic heir of Cesar in bringing order out of 
the horrible chaos of the barbarian centuries. 
Soon a brother of Saint Benedict stood by the 
rough chair of every athletic savage who disputed 
for a term some segment of what had once been 
Rome. The most active missionaries came from 
Ireland, evangelized by Saint Patrick (450) and 
called for the present the Island of Saints. Saint 
Remy converted the Franks (496), Saint Boniface 
the Germans (689). Hungary was Christianized 
about 1000, thus opening up in Christian lands a 
trade route to the East. The conversion of the 
high prince Vladimir in the tenth century brought 
all Russia under the wing of the Greek Church. 
Pope Gregory the Great, while still a deacon, ad- 
miring the beauty of some Nordic boys exposed as 
slaves in the crumbling Forum, sighed his cele- 
brated Non Angli sed Angeli, and years later sent 
a Benedictine prior, Augustin, to make their little 
brothers children of Christ. He baptized the 
Jutish “king” of Kent, and building himself a 


72 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


wattled church at Canterbury, became first arch- 
bishop of the English. The Cross reappeared in 
the country of our fathers, and the Church in 
England gave an immediate example of unity 
which the Saxons were too slow to imitate 
politically, as they learned to their cost when their 
thanes perished around King Harold on Hastings 
hill, and England became a fief of Norman William 
(1066). Long before this, however, England was 
more Christian than many parts of the Continent. 
From the stormy Hebrides to “‘the sunset bounds 
of Lyonesse,” from the musical solitudes of Yarrow 
and Annan-water to the Ultima Thule of the an- 
cient geographers, rose little centers of Catholic 
civilization against which the drift and foam of 
their savage environment broke in vain. 

At the same time, with the activities of the 
Benedictine missionaries, developed the phenom- 
enon known as the temporal power of the Papacy. 
Christ had said: “My kingdom is not of this 
world,” but this totally religious ideal could 
scarcely maintain itself in the catastrophe of the 
dark ages. By the very force of history the 
Church was compelled to occupy itself specific- 
ally with the things of this world. In its origins, 
the political function of the Papacy was nothing 
more or less than a work of charity. In the dis- 
appearance of a western emperor and during the 
successive assaults on Italy, known as the bar- 


MONASTICISM 73 


barian invasions, the pope found himself obliged 
to act as a chief of state, if only to mitigate the 
universal hardness of life during those chaotic 
times. The incarnation of this apostolic period 
of the Papacy, when it was a theocracy by neces- 
sity, was Saint Gregory the Great (590-604), he 
who had said non Angli sed Angeli, and sent Au- 
gustin to Christianize the English. His pontificate 
roughly coincided with the Lombard domination 
over Italy, when Benedictine, a monk, hidden in his 
cell on the Ccelian mount, seemed the last hope of 
a distracted Christendom. 

In the year 800 a Frankish chieftain, Charle- 
magne, restored order to Italy and, relatively, to 
Europe by having himself crowned on Christmas 
Day in St. Peter’s basilica at Rome, first head of 
the Holy Roman Empire. This event indicated 
that the moment had come for the pope to lay 
down the grand temporal role he had by force 
adopted, and accept in exchange the position of 
small Italian prince over Rome and the vicinity 
which the feudal dispensation inaugurated by 
Charlemagne allotted to him. In return for the 
almost imperial power which the Papacy had 
hitherto beneficently wielded and must now abdi- 
cate, was the temporal sovereignty over the small 
strip of “‘Peter’s patrimony” thrown to the popes 
as a sop by the successors of Charlemagne. The 
avidity with which the pontiffs clung to this morsel 


74 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


of territory during the dark ages has been ad- 
versely commented upon by historians, who fail to 
understand that the Papacy was once more pro- 
pelled into an inappropriate political role by the 
very force of historical accident. ‘The poor suc- 
cessors of Saint Peter were beleaguered, as it were, 
in a triangular fashion by three hostile powers— 
the Holy Roman Emperor, with his pretensions on 
Italy and the eternal city, the rough Latin barons 
and the turbulent populace of the commune itself, 
incited by republican tribunes. Ten times in the 
course of a century the sovereign pontiff was 
forced to hide himself in the castle of Sant Angelo, 
or flee to the Alps. It is no wonder that under 
this incessant burden of alarms and anguishes the 
popes were ambitious, not only for themselves, but 
for the Church, and often unscrupulous in the 
means adopted to secure her future, which seemed 
to lie in the uncontested possession of a territory. 
The theorists who criticize the temporal power 
from the tranquillity of their own rectories do not 
realize that it then seemed the one saving plank 
for the Church in the universal shipwreck of so- 
ciety. The secular power was the guarantee of 
religious integrity. The Church was obliged to 
reign in order not to perish. 

A Benedictine community, Cluny, founded in 
“the lost kingdom of Burgundy” (910) showed 
the Papacy the better way. The Cluniac revival 


MONASTICISM 75 


dreamed of a pure theocracy under popes stamped 
with its own image. Here it collided with all those 
forces hostile to the Papacy we have mentioned 
above, but chiefly with that curious embodiment 
of civil unity known as the Holy Roman Empire. 
Had the latter really been able to restore order 
to Europe, the Church and the popes would doubt- 
less have been able to abdicate secular ambitions 
and devote themselves purely to the government of 
souls; this will be later the dream of Dante in his 
De Monarchia. For a time all went well; the im- 
perial lion and the papal lamb lay down together; 
but it all ended in a new dismemberment with the 
successors of Charlemagne and those of Peter 
snarling at each other among the fragments. 
France split away from the Empire in 970 under 
a line of national kings which survived through 
the centuries until Ninety-Three, when a certain 
Louis Capet wrote the Swiss “‘to cease firing,’”’ and 
a few months later put his head under the knife. 
In the south of France there rose from the ashes of 
the gnosis a new heretical church, well organized, 
and, under the circumstances, plausible, based as 
it was on the dogma that the world of the dark 
ages was irredeemably evil. Even under its own 
kings the identity and nationality of France 
seemed hopelessly submerged in a welter of inde- 
pendent fiefs, Normandy, Brittany, Anjou, the 
Duchy of Aquitaine, the County of Toulouse, the 


76 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Kingdom of Arles, etc. As for the German em- 
perors, they were unable to keep order in their 
own patrimony, let alone in their more distant fiefs, 
like Lombardy. Time after time they thundered 
down the passes of the Alps, reduced the Lombard 
towns, Milan, Venice and the rest, nominated and 
invested the German and Italian bishops, and at- 
tempted to interfere with papal elections. A 
Cluniac Pope, Nicholas II (1059), put an end to 
this last abuse by regulating for all time the elec- 
tion of a new pontiff. He placed it in the hands 
of the pastors over the most ancient and venerated 
Roman churches. These persons were hencefor- 
ward called cardinals; they might be bishops, 
priests or deacons so far as sacramental “order” 
was concerned, and collectively they formed the 
curia or papal court. 

The Catholic Church radiating from the Holy 
See, and the far-off little island kingdom of Eng- 
land, furnish the only two examples of decent 
organization in this early feudal age of evil dis- 
order. After 1122 bishops were elected by their 
cathedral clergy (the chapter) though the election 
had to be ratified by the pope. They were con- 
secrated by three other bishops, and then en- 
throned; that is, they took formal possession of 
their cathedral and see. Thereafter they kept up 
communication with the Head of the Church by 
periodical journeys to Rome ad limina A posto- 


MONASTICISM 77 


lorum. They in turn selected, from the diaconate, 
or the seminaries, priests for the various scattered 
parishes of their sees who were supported by a 
tithe or tax paid by every member of the parish 
from the lord down. A proportion of this tax 
went to the bishop, who was accustomed to for- 
ward the income from his first year of residence 
(Annates) to the pope. The whole system was 
admirably interdependent, and it worked. 
Elsewhere there was no unity, no central govern- 
ment, no education, no art or literature, no peace. 
The dark ages grew steadily darker as they ap- 
proached dawn, so dark that the European world 
was seized with an obscure impression that it was 
unfit to live and was indeed ripe for destruction. 
Cassandra-voices among the clergy proclaimed, on 
the basis of some obscure phrase in the Scriptures, 
that the thousandth year from the Nativity would 
see the end of all and the second coming of the 
Incarnate Word upon clouds of judgment. 


We have come a long way from our source—the 
light that streams upon this Church from the pure 
and gracious figure of Jesus standing on the other 
side of the troubled centuries and saying: “My 
Kingdom is not of this world.” It is even a long 
way from the half-mythical Apostles, administer- 
ing the Sacraments in an upper room, to a dis- 
tracted Bishop of Rome, surrounded by scarlet 


78 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


cardinals, contending amid fallen columns and 
grassy colonnades, with all the forces of dying bar- 
barism, dawning nationalism, greed, murder and 
feudal anarchy. At one end of the long chain, 
the Nazarene; at the other Gregory VII in his 
lonely palace-church of Lateran. The issue at 
stake was the evolution of a Church which would 
unite and. direct the energies of all these half- 
barbarian nations, and having established its 
supremacy at their expense, would then return to 
the spirit of the Gospels and give to the new Eu- 
rope the gift of peace and reason. A renaissance 
of art and literature might well follow, for they 
would be the expression of a consummation, and 
not, save in a fashion of phrase and drawing, a 
return to the pagan past. That the Church 
achieved such a consummation for a season is no 
less certain than that it failed in the end. The 
failure is not remarkable. What is remarkable, 
and even stupefying, is the perversity of its critics 
who, in the same breath, blame the Church for the 
attempt, and then denounce it for the failure. 


Che Consummation 


[| r000-1300 | 





CHAPTER VIII 
THE MIRAGE 


Hap one of those monks discussed in the previ- 
ous chapter been enabled, like Rip Van Winkle, to 
doze off toward the end of the tenth century, to 
sleep safely through the fateful year 1000, and 
then to wake up suddenly, he might have rubbed 
his eyes with the sentiment that he was living in 
another world. The long stagnation of the bar- 
barian centuries had been broken; a wind of moral 
enthusiasm was ruffling those dead waters. The 
force behind this transformation was the primitive 
emotion of relief. Europe had just come through 
its millennial crisis. —The Ides of March passed in 
an agony of foreboding, and nothing untoward 
took place. This blow to clerical infallibility, far 
from producing incredulity, roused a revival of 
almost frenzied enthusiasm. Beautiful romanesque 
churches sprang up like Troy to the sound of 
hymns and chants and songs of thanksgiving. 
There was a burst of energy throughout Europe in 
which the young fresh Norman race, the sons of 
Vikings, played an active role. The Norman con- 
quest of England and the two Sicilies took place 
during this period. Austere and energetic popes, 


stamped with the image of Cluny, tightened their 
81 


82 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


hold on the reins of a tremendous adventure. And 
presently the roads of Europe were drumming 
with the crusaders, glorious as the sun at mid- 
day, terrible as an army with banners. 

Pilgrimages to the places rendered celebrated 
by the Gospels were, of course, not uncommon 
before the Crusades. The pilgrims who returned, 
or palmers as they were called, were the only 
persons with any first-hand knowledge of the Near 
East, but no extraordinary interest was mani- 
fested in their recitals by the rough barons who 
preferred to believe the wildest Arabian tales 
about that fantastic civilization so completely be- 
yond their ken. The reality of the Orient would 
have dazzled them more than any vision of it. 
Ignorance, doubled by indifference, was the normal 
European attitude toward the East when events 
occurred that precipitated a blaze of pity and in- 
dignation producing the Crusades. 

Palestine had been one of the conquests of the 
Caliph Omar, successor of Mohammed, in his 
startling extension of Islam from the Arabian 
desert to the Pyrenees. His successors, the Fati- 
mite soldans of Egypt, who were the protectors of 
the Holy Land, treated the Christian immigrants 
well enough, partly for commercial reasons, partly 
because the Moslems reverence Jesus far more 
than most Christians reverence Mohammed. But 
the situation was altered when a fanatic named 


THE MIRAGE 83 


Hakem, himself the son of a Christian girl, seized 
the power. From his time the Holy Sepulcher 
could only be approached on condition of defiling 
it. This together with similar outrages produced 
the first Crusade. 

That is the concrete historic cause of the Cru- 
sades, but in this Catholic adventure, which is more 
than half apocalyptic, one must look for motives 
more deeply connected with the mysteries of the 
human heart. Man is naturally a wanderer. The 
nostalgia for distant lands and other horizons, the 
call from beyond the mountains, plays an im- 
portant part in the development of every conscious- 
ness; it is the basis of all romanticism, religious or 
literary. Sexuality counts for more in all this than 
many people suppose. The Greek Emperor Alexis 
understood this when he extolled to the crusaders 
the beauty of the Byzantine women. Religion is 
another Eros which allures and never satisfies. 
The very barbarian invasions, base scramble as 
they were, contained this sentiment. The Ger- 
mans sought in the south Asgard, the home of 
gods and heroes; they reached Rome, and there, 
in the ruinous solitude of the capital, they en- 
countered the white apparition of Jesus. The 
crusaders, says Michelet, who had suffered such 
incredible hardships, sustained by the love of Jeru- 
salem, perceived, on arriving, that the City of God 
was not by the Brook Kerith or in the stony valley 


84 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


of Jehoshaphat. . . “The Arabs were amazed 
when they saw Godfrey de Bouillon seated in 
dejection on the ground. ‘Is not the ground good 
enough,’ said the conqueror sorrowfully, ‘when we 
shall soon return to it for so long a sleep?’ They 
withdrew in admiration. The East and the West 
had understood each other.” 

There is no need to describe the Crusades in de- 
tail. The first (1095) was an indiscriminate 
rabble of feudality led by Peter the Hermit, a 
French monk, and Godfrey de Bouillon, a French 
nobleman. After an orgy of misconduct in the 
Greek court and incredible hardships by land and 
sea, a tithe of the original host reached Jerusalem. 
There they attested the beauty of Christ’s re- 
ligion by massacring several hundred Jews and 
Arabs. They called their conquest the Latin King- 
dom of Jerusalem. 

The second Crusade (1144) preached unwill- 
ingly by the famous Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, 
was placed under the direction of the Emperor 
Conrad and the pious Louis VII of France, who 
was accompanied by his gay and beautiful wife, 
Eleanor of Aquitaine. It was a failure. The third 
(1190), occasioned by the recapture of Jerusalem, 
was led by the Emperor Henry VI, Philip Augustus 
of France and the celebrated Richard Coeur de 
Léon; it also ended in a fiasco. Islam about this 
time had been undergoing a kind of Protestant 


THE MIRAGE 85 


reform under the Emir Saladin, the Washington 
of the Moslems, who adhered to the strict letter 
of the Koran, and regarded Jews, Christians, 
Mohammedan mystics and free-thinkers with an 
equal dislike. His dream was not only to repel a 
Christian crusade but to lead a Moslem one into 
the heart of Europe. It was a tenable enterprise, 
and the third Crusade, abortive as it was, may 
well have saved the west from a holy war con- 
ducted by this gallant and dangerous enemy. 

Prodigies of war were performed by the lion- 
hearted one, but his allies were jealous and treach- 
erous, and he was finally left with a small force 
in sight of Jerusalem. It is said that he covered 
his face with his shield at sight of those sparkling 
towers, saying: “Suffer me not to see Thy holy 
City, O Lord, since I am not able to deliver it.” 

The astuteness of the Venetians turned the 
fourth Crusade upon the unfortunate Greek Em- 
pire, while the fifth (1229) was an amiable gen- 
tlemen’s agreement between an infidel Emperor, 
Frederick II, and the soldan of Egypt in virtue 
of which Jerusalem was restored to the Christians 
without a drop of bloodshed. This arrangement 
so disconcerted the medieval mind that on the 
evening of Frederick’s coronation as German king 
of Jerusalem, the patriarch made his entrance and 
laid a papal interdict upon the holy city which had 
dared to crown the pope’s enemy. 


86 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


The Crusades had no particular effect upon 
Asia, but they had a remarkable one upon the 
crusaders themselves, and through them upon 
Europe. They had begun their odyssey with a 
deep hatred of the Mohammedan and a feeling 
of cordial expectation regarding the Christians of 
the Orient, the Greeks, Armenians, etc. Experi- 
ence taught them to reverse their preconceptions. 
The Greeks and Armenians betrayed and cheated 
them, as they have done now and then since, and 
they discovered that the abhorred Moslem was by 
nature more of a gentleman than most contempo- 
rary Christians. It is a discovery which was not 
unknown during the last war. 

From treating one’s enemy with respect to 
treating one’s unhappy Christian serfs with even 
the most elementary humanity was only one step. 
The poor encountered liberty while seeking Jerusa- 
lem. The same community of suffering revived in 
a degree the touching equality of the first Chris- 
tian centuries, and produced modern democracy, 
the democracy I mean of Leaves of Grass, not the 
cheap political formula. Thereafter the serf could 
look into the eyes of the ruthless man who had 
been his master and say: I found a cup of water 
for you in the desert; I shielded you with my body 
at Jerusalem; together we have known the cama- 
raderie of the Cross. 


CHAPTER IX 


THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE FEUDAL 
STATE 


INTERWOVEN with the first Crusades there was 
yet another movement which runs through the 
early Middle Ages—the eleventh and twelfth cen- 
turies—and this was the struggle of the Church to 
save her independence of action from encroach- 
ments by growing federal governments. Like 
much in the Middle Ages this movement is of high 
interest on account of its very duality and contra- 
dictions; it, too, had passion and right on one side 
and the other; good contended with good; Church 
and State had, respectively, their clerics who were 
pure politicians and their bureaucrats who were 
saints; and in Becket the Church had a solitary 
champion who was first one, then the other. In 
order to trace the struggle properly it is necessary 
to go back a little and present the reader with a 
picture of Europe as it was when the false vapor 
from the year 1000 had rolled away, and the world 
entered upon its medieval period. 

And first two principles, two powers attempted 


to grapple with the chaos of feudality bequeathed 
87 


88 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


by the dark ages—the Papacy and the Holy Em- 
pire. Both failed for a season because both were 
eaten with the disease they desired to combat; 
the Germanic State, founded by Charlemagne, had 
become a feudal state, but so had the Church. 
From the glittering fortalice of Aix, and from the 
Lateran, emperor and pope looked down a world 
once mapped and well mapped by the Romans, 
but which had fallen into a vast disrepair. Over 
the brown dusty tracks of Gaul and the two hun- 
dred Germanies the pale threads of imperial roads 
had one by one broken off, and, dominating their 
severed intersections, was the solitary donjon and 
the gallows. No land was without its lord who 
owned it in effect absolutely, coined money, waged 
war, did justice or rather injustice, and bequeathed 
it all to the eldest son, who did likewise. As in the 
time of Benedict, there seemed no refuge for the 
civilized but the Church, and the latter’s catho- 
licity and holiness were menaced and degraded by 
the Sabbat of environing feudalism. Younger 
sons who could expect nothing from the eldest but 
the scraps kept from his dogs took Holy Orders as 
the one chance of independent survival. They 
became bishops, abbots, that is to say, barons in 
cassocks, wolves in sheep’s clothing. ‘‘They skir 
the country, hunt, fight, bestow blows by way of 
benison and impose heavy penance with their iron 
maules.” One German bishop was deposed by 


CHURCH AND FEUDAL STATE 89 


his brethren for being insufficiently warlike. One 
thing only was wanting, and that was that these 
fighting clerks be married with the legitimate right 
to leave their holdings to a multitude of little 
priestlings. This did not fail to come about in 
certain places. In Brittany there were four mar- 
ried bishops, their Lordships of Quimper, Vannes, 
Rennes and Nantes; their children became priests 
and succeeded their consecrated fathers. One of 
the reasons why Gregory VII blessed the Norman 
Conquest of England was that the preponderance 
of married priests in the Saxon Church had placed 
that body almost outside the pale of orthodoxy. 
The day of the universal Church was done if it 
were about to relapse into the materialism and 
confusion of a final feudal State. There could be 
no more Crusades if their paladin was to have his 
warhorse encumbered by the good wife abreast 
instead of a shield, and his offspring clinging to the 
pommel. 

To the debased feudalism of the bishops suc- 
ceeded the sovereignty of one man—the pope, and 
Christianity became immaculately reincarnate in 
a monk. His name was Hildebrand and he is 
known in history as Gregory VII. Like Chris- 
tianity’s founder, its reincarnation was a carpen- 
ter’s son, hardly higher in rank than a serf. He 
was a pupil of Cluny, imbued with its monastic 
and theocratic ideas, and when he became Pope 


90 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


he put them into immediate and sensational prac- 
tice. Under Nicholas II he had several times 
remarked that a married priest was no priest at 
all, a statement which, when he became Pope, 
caused the greatest excitement all the way from 
Rome to the Welsh border. “We prefer,” said 
the agitated husbands, “to abandon our dioceses, 
our abbacies and cures. Let the joiner’s son keep 
our benefices and let us keep our wives.” The 
joiner’s son smiled in virginal disdain and by an 
encyclical or two loosed the people on the married 
priests. Bishops were hustled, beaten up and even 
mutilated in their own cathedrals. The monk San 
Pietro Damiani traversed Italy, careless of his 
life, stripping bare with unparalleled cynicism the 
vices of the effeminate Church. In a short time 
all married priests were declared excommunicate, 
and it was considered no sin to kill them. 

Then in her recovered and savage virginity the 
Church, headed by this reformer, turned and 
attacked her brother, the Empire. The latter, 
during the early Middle Age, really deemed itself 
another Church. Cesar on occasions donned the 
dalmatic of the minor orders and reappeared as 
Pontifex Maximus, chanting the Gospel on high 
festivals of Aix or Mainz. Moreover, he was, dur- 
ing the eleventh century, justly considered the 
only great territorial prince on the European map. 
Though he could hardly keep order in his Ger- 


CHURCH AND FEUDAL STATE 91 


man household, he possessed lands and allies in 
Cisalpine Gaul and also Transalpine, far on the 
French side of the Rhine. Though neither holy 
or Roman the Empire in the early Middle Age 
was incontestably an Empire, but unwieldy and 
as disorderly as a beer-house. It was the arch- 
type of the feudal state, one whose head was 
not strong enough to keep peace and just strong 
enough to make trouble. But the confidence of 
these Franconian and Suabian barbarians who 
carried the globe and the iron crown was enor- 
mous. The discovery and study of the Roman 
law in the second part of the eleventh century 
added fuel to their pretensions. Here was a sys- 
tem, ready made, which worked perfectly on paper, 
where no mention was made of pope or canons, 
and a great deal was made of the emperor. Had 
not Charlemagne desired to be the successor of 
Augustus and Trajan? Armed with this instru- 
ment of parchment the Holy Roman Emperor at- 
tempted to rule not only the bodies but the con- 
sciences of his subjects, and when the Canon Law 
conflicted with the Roman, he disregarded it. Was 
he not himself a kind of priest? He was speedily 
imitated by minor princes; even the Norman kings 
of far-away little England, the conquest of which 
had been authorized by Gregory VII, stirred on 
their rushes, and William Rufus, resisted only by 
Saint Anselm, stole from the Church, and repented 


92 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


in the gusty medieval manner, and stole again. 

The principal cause at stake, now that the 
emperor could no longer meddle directly with 
papal investiture, was the investiture of other 
bishops—those who, as subjects of the Empire, 
came in the sphere of his authority. The Ger- 
man bishops might be subjects of the pope in 
religion; they remained none the less property 
owners, responsible for their fiefs to no one but 
the emperor, and to him they were vassals. In 
every country it was the same; insofar as they 
were priests they belonged to the pope; insofar 
as they were property owners they entered into 
the feudal scheme of things and belonged to the 
feudal state. The emperor, aided by the Roman 
law, was trying to make the feudal state into an 
absolute monarchy. Absolute, that is to say, over 
this zmperium of clerks who were often very war- 
like and powerful, and who were partially free 
men, liberated by their orders from his control. 
But, on the basis of the feudal relationship, should 
the emperor seize the additional right to invest 
the bishops and abbots with ring and crozier, sym- 
bols of their religious character, they became in 
soul as well as body his men; the double allegiance 
became a single one; and the pope lost the right 
to their loyalty. In every country where there was 
a king, the Church would cease to exist as an 
international Church.’ That was the true prob- 


CHURCH AND FEUDAL STATE 93 


lem, and it is no wonder that a reformer and nat- 
ural theocrat like Gregory rushed to defend the 
Church from what amounted to a sacrifice of 
identity. 

The Emperor Henry IV, imitated by other 
princes, openly practiced this important right of 
investiture and was promptly excommunicated by 
Gregory. It was a superstitious age; the Emperor 
repented in the violent manner of the period and 
spent three days barefoot in the snow before the 
Pope’s castle at Canossa before the “Servant of 
God” would admit him to communion. It is not 
reported that the Emperor died of grip, but as 
a result of his intransigence the Pope died in exile. 
“T have loved justice and hated iniquity,” said he 
in the words of the Psalmist, ‘‘therefore I die in 
banishment.” ‘The astonishing thing is that the 
emperor was not the ultimate victor. A compro- 
mise was patched up called the Concordat of 
Worms in 1122 whereby the bishops and abbots 
continued to do homage to the princes for their 
lands, but the staff and ring they received from 
their consecrators. The symbolism of the Middle 
Ages interpreted this agreement as a victory by the 
shade of Gregory, as indeed it was. 

The second and climactic quarrel, though in 
reality, the self-same problem, was won over an 
apparently new issue, in a distant country again 
by a single man. In 1154 the Angevin Henry II 


94 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


became King of England. He was a man of 
extraordinary energy, a born bureaucrat with his 
finger in every pie, who only varied eight hours 
of business by mad intervals of hunting and 
lechery. This King is remembered by the English 
as the Justinian of their legal system which is 
based neither on Canon nor on Roman law, but on 
the old Anglo-Saxon mores, the customs of the first 
English tribes. He began an abolition of the fool- 
ish ordeals which still disgraced English justice 
in the first Middle Age, and instituted a kind of 
trial by jury. A man so intent on reforming the 
whole judicial system could not fail to collide with 
the one institution which up to date kept its own 
justice intact, namely, the Catholic Church. 

In the estimation of Henry and his legists the 
separate Church courts represented a crying scan- 
dal. First they had sole jurisdiction over priests, 
and the world “clerk” in the twelfth century was 
extremely elastic and covered every one having the 
slightest connection, however remote with religion 
—students, crusaders, choristers, sacristans, in 
short all the vaguely literate class. The Church 
courts, moreover, judged a large variety of cases 
which to-day are dealt with by civil law, cases 
involving wills, oaths, contracts, divorce suits, to 
say nothing of the three medieval crimes of blas- 
phemy, sorcery and heresy. All this width of 
jurisdiction was, in Henry’s opinion, utterly un- 


CHURCH AND FEUDAL STATE 95 


sound. But his chief grievance against the Church 
courts was, that wonderful to relate, they were a 
great deal too lenient. Their gentleness, contrasted 
with the savage regime of the Norman conquerers, 
rendered them extremely popular with the subject 
race and the poor for whom the Church posed as, 
and often was, the sole protector and friend. 

The King’s fingers fairly burned to bring this in- 
stitution, at once so arrogant and sweet, into line 
with his severe judicial reform. Only it was neces- 
sary to proceed with policy. His closest friend at 
that time was his Chancellor, a child of the de- 
spised Saxon race, and a deacon in orders, Thomas 
a Becket. He was a sympathetic personage, a great 
lover of hounds and hawks, perhaps a trifle too 
tactful and sleek. ‘‘Were Becket Primate,” 
thought the King, “Head of the Church in Eng- 
land which, under the dispensation of our Holy 
Father, Alexander III, is almost an independent 
patriarchate, the Church is mine since Becket is 
mine.” So he made the supreme mistake of nomi- 
nating his best friend Archbishop of Canterbury. 

Great was the King’s amazement when he 
learned that his best friend took his new duties 
seriously. The worldling and companion of royal 
pleasures cut down his expenses, wore a hair-shirt, 
remembered that he was Saxon, and surrounded 
himself with poor people or with intelligent monks, 
John of Salisbury, Gerald Cambrensis, Walter Map, 


96 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


the last a good man but the author of some of the 
most swinish satires ever penned against the vices 
of the clergy. This change of front was very ill- 
timed, since Henry and his lawyers had just com- 
pleted the Constitutions of Clarendon. The latter 
provided that all persons tried by Church courts 
should be punished as they merited by the cruel 
Common Law. This meant an end to ecclesiastic 
mercy. The Constitutions also limited appeals to 
Rome; this meant an end to ecclesiastic independ- 
ence. Losing with the power of excommunica- 
tion the mighty weapon which remained to her, 
the English Church, cut off from Rome, imprisoned 
on her island, would lose all sense of universality, 
of catholicism. Under their air of being nothing at 
all, the Clarendon Articles represented the most 
serious frontal attack ever delivered upon the free- 
dom of the Church, a freedom fraught with 
potential evils, but essential in the Middle Ages to 
civilization and progress. At all events they were 
triumphantly concluded, and Henry sent them to 
the new Primate to be signed. 

Becket sent them back unsigned. When up- 
braided by the King, he replied that while a lay- 
man he had loyally tried to serve the State, and 
now that he was Primate of the English his first 
duty was to them and the Church, and to no one 
else. New to his position, menaced by the King 
and contending with his own scruples—that ‘“‘in- 


CHURCH AND FEUDAL STATE 97 


curable duality of the Middle Age,” its sense of 
rival allegiance—he at first gave way, and then re- 
pented his weakness with violence. “Wretch that 
I am,” he said, “‘I came out of the King’s kennel, 
not out of the Church; I the lover of mummers and 
dogs am become the guardian of souls. I am not 
worthy, and for my unworthiness I am abandoned 
of God.” The dismay and anger of the King knew 
no limit; and from that moment the Clarendon 
Articles became secondary, the chief thing being 
the ruin of his former favorite. In 1164 he sum- 
moned him to a Convocation at Northampton. 
The Archbishop, after saying Mass, the first words 
of which happened to be: “The princes are met in 
council to judge me,” proceeded to the court in his 
pontifical vestments, the archiepiscopal cross going 
on before. Courtiers threw straw and rushes at 
him as he passed. He appealed to the Pope and 
slowly withdrew. That night he gave a great feast 
for all the poor of the city. When the King’s 
agents arrived to arrest him they found only the 
dying lights and empty hall, and learned that the 
Archbishop had already taken horse toward the 
Continent. 

The whole medieval world watched the struggle 
of this one priest for the interests of the Church 
with indifference tempered by irony. The Pope 
Alexander III was at that moment at Sens in 
France where he had fled from the vengeance of 


98 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa against whom 
he had backed the Lombard towns. It did not suit 
him at such a juncture to offend the most powerful 
prince of the world next to the Emperor, that is 
the King of England. The Norman and English 
bishops of course supported the King with frantic 
toadyism against their Primate. Becket fought his 
fight single-handed save for the dubious patronage 
of his host, Louis VII of France, who wished to 
redeem by some pious action the fiasco of the 
second Crusade. The tenacity of Becket wore 
out even the pious Frank. “What more do you 
want?” he demanded, after Henry had made some 
perfidious offers to his late best friend, ‘‘Peace is 
in your hands.” But Becket was unconvinced, and 
yielded neither to threats nor to fair words. 

After six years he wrote the King that he was 
about to return to England, alleging that he could 
no longer see his church of Canterbury, mother of 
British churches, despoiled by the Norman vassals 
among whom Henry had divided the old archdio- 
cese. In.any event Christmas was nigh, and he 
wished to celebrate in his own cathedral-church 
the Midnight Mass of Christ’s happy birth. 

When he approached the shore and the people 
discerned the glitter of the archiepiscopal cross on 
the prow they hastened in crowds down to the 
sands so that they might have his blessing. These 
Saxons and poor folk seemed to know what was 


CHURCH AND FEUDAL STATE 99 


going to happen. Their priests went to meet him 
at the head of the parish corporations, flanked by 
banners, and all said that Christ was come to suffer 
a second time for the Church in England, just as at 
Jerusalem he had suffered for the universe. The 
Archbishop arrived at Canterbury in a medley of 
hymns and the joyous clangor of bells. When he 
reached his palace he sat down and dictated two 
letters, one to the Pope asking him to offer the 
prayers for the dying, the other excommunicating 
the English bishops who had taken the King’s 
side in the quarrel. 

When the King, who was in Normandy, heard of 
this last defiance he fell into one of those famous 
Angevin spasms which were a mark of his bad 
family. He threw off his cap, rolled on the ground, 
literally bit the dust and chewed the rushes into 
straw. ‘Have I fed cowards in my house all these 
years,” he moaned as soon as he could speak, “‘that 
no one will deliver me from this pestilent priest?” 
Four of his vassals, feeling this to be a challenge 
to their feudal honor, took him at his word. They 
took horse for the sea, and that night crossed the 
Channel. It was the day after Christmas, 1170, 
eve of the Holy Innocents. 

Becket was told that the town was full of armed 
men, and was advised by his canons to take sanctu- 
ary in the cathedral. He made some proud reply 
to the effect that a church is not a donjon, but 


100 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


recalling that it was the hour for the first Vespers 
of the feast, he prepared to make his entrance into 
the cathedral. Arrayed in a white cope and a 
white mitre, the silver cross at his side, and the 
frightened canons in their snowy mantles preced- 
ing him, the great Archbishop took his place at his 
throne in the sanctuary and chanted the first 
words of the Office: Deus in adjutorium, meum 
intende. At that moment the mailed feet of the 
four knights were heard on the flags as they came 
rapidly up the vast and gloomy nave. A voice ex- 
claimed: ‘‘Where is the traitor?” The tall figure, 
illustrious in the sanctuary which alone blazed 
with lights, made a step forward. ‘‘There is no 
traitor here,” he said. ‘‘What is your purpose?” — 
“Your death.”—“T am prepared for it, but I order 
you in the name of God not to touch my people 
here.”’ As he said this he received a blow with the 
flat of the sword. A second blow threw him down 
and his blood covered the mosaic. Some one 
kicked the senseless body, and leaving the terrified 
monks, they went away through the shadows say- 
ing: “He sought to be king and more than king; 
let him king it now.” At that instant, as some- 
times happens in a mild winter, a storm with thun- 
ders and lightnings burst over the violated church. 

Thus died Becket because he would not sign 
away the independence of the Catholic Church in 
his own country, and the Church naturally gained 


CHURCH AND FEUDAL STATE 101 


more by this single martyrdom than by centuries 
of resistance. The Pope, now triumphant over 
Barbarossa, pretended to be very indignant, but his 
position as regards the imperial House of Suabia 
was still too precarious for him to be very hard 
on the great and terrible English King. As for 
Henry II he protested his horror and innocence, 
withdrew the Constitutions of Clarendon and 
promised to head the third Crusade later under- 
taken by his son, Richard Coeur de Léon. The 
Catholic Church in England was immune from gov- 
ernmental interference till the era of Henry VIII. 
Becket was canonized, and is known to the world 
as Saint Thomas of Canterbury. It was to his 
shrine in that city that the pilgrims traveled in 
the pages of Chaucer. Up till the Reformation he 
was the most popular saint in the English calendar. 
Four hundred years later when the absolute State 
in the person of Henry VIII broke the Catholic 
Church in England once and forever, as a prelim- 
inary to altering its religion, the first doctrinal act 
of the over-married King was to erase the name of 
Becket from the Liturgy, because in 1170 he saved 
the English Church from becoming what he 
(Henry) was then making it, and what it has re- 
mained ever since. ~ 

Only thirty years after this victory secured. by 
a martyrdom, the Church reached its apotheosis 
when Innocent III was elected to the Papacy. 


102 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


The heir to the ever dangerous House of Suabia, 
the Emperor Frederick II, was a child, and Inno- 
cent was his tutor. This Pope then proceeded to 
crush the Albigensian heretics in the south of 
France, to institute a new and popular type of mo- 
nasticism, to receive from King John England as 
a fief of the Holy See and at the Lateran Council 
to abolish serfdom. ‘The greatest of Catholic cen- 
turies was inaugurated by the greatest of medieval 
popes. What could the poor Empire do against 
this tremendous moral power, lacking territories 
and arms, strong only in the sentence of excom- 
munication and the interdict? However, it did 
its best, and from now on the duel between the 
two powers becomes bitter, atrocious, mortal. 
Frederick II became a man, gibed pleasantly at 
all religions, the Christian in particular, hemmed 
in the Pope from the north and from the two Sici- 
lies, and suggested to his brother sovereigns a uni- 
versal despoilment of the Church. He died with 
a jeer, and then the Papacy took a terrible revenge 
upon his children. Their beauty, their genius, 
their feudal honor, the love and loyalty they 
evoked, availed them not at all. The air of Rome 
was fatal to these tragic Hohenstauffens. Freder- 
ick’s one legitimate son, Conrad, appeared there 
only to die. His other son, the beautiful King 
Enzio, perished in an Italian prison, betrayed as he 
tried to escape by a lock of his fair hair. Little 


CHURCH AND FEUDAL STATE 103 


Corradino, last of the family, saw his Sicilian in- 
heritance given away by Clement IV to Charles 
of Anjou, the brother of Saint Louis of France. 
He, a child of fifteen, accompanied by his bosom 
friend, Frederick of Austria, galloped past Rome in 
a desperate effort to recover it. The Pope watched 
the boys pass from the Lateran. “Let the victims 
go,” was all that he said. Corradino was cap- 
tured, and contrary to all laws of medieval honor, 
the child of fifteen was executed by the sbires of 
Charles of Anjou together with his friend. It 
was the end of the House of Suabia, the fall of 
the feudal state. There was no more Holy Empire 
save in name. Where their lances had glimmered 
in Alpine glens, now shone a bishop’s staff. 


CHAPTER X 
THE APOCALYPSE OF SAINT LOUIS 


THE failure of the first Crusades did not appear 
to affect the prestige of the popes who directed 
them. Never before or since has the Holy See 
been more elevated in its pretensions and powers 
than during the thirteenth century, under Inno- 
cent III. Its elevation, however, was dizzy and 
deceptive. Raised to a towering height, the Pope 
saw more clearly the dangers that surrounded him. 
“The massy fabric, framed of apostles, saints and 
doctors, planted its roots far into the ground... . 
but against it beat all the winds both from east and 
west, from Europe and Asia, from the past and the 
future.” 

In southern France, side by side with the Catho- 
lic Church here had arisen another—the Mani- 
chean—whose holy places were Albi and Toulouse. 
It was a disconcerting survival of the old antisocial 
Gnosticism believed to have been crushed in the 
fourth century. The death-struggle between the 
two faiths seemed imminent in 1200. Already the 


heretic church was organized, had its bishops, mis- 
104 


APOCALYPSE OF SAINT LOUIS 105 


sioners and general councils. It was sustained by 
the wealth, the easy-going culture, and gay living 
of that French Syria, where the beautiful language 
of oc was spoken. Raymond VI of Toulouse and 
other meridional princes, whose vices were flattered 
by the contemptuous indifference of Manicheism 
to the flesh, openly protected the sectaries and 
made light of the Papal Supremacy. 

It was not merely that the Midi was becoming 
rapidly orientalized; the Orient itself was knocking 
at the gates of Europe. The latter was weary of 
Crusades, yet never was a Crusade more necessary. 
A new and terrible people—the Mongols—seemed 
determined to restore all Asia to the naked beauty 
of prehistoric life. In northern China alone they 
had already fired several hundred cities. One wing 
swept down on Bagdad, and from there, raided 
Jerusalem. The terror of them filled Europe. In 
the year 1238 the sailors of Denmark and Frisia 
dared not leave their wives to pursue the annual 
herring fishing. Asia Minor expected every day 
to see those monstrous painted forms and shaggy 
horses appearing on the horizon. Before this 
ghastly and common peril, Christian and Mussul- 
man momentarily joined hands. The Moslem 
princes sent ambassadors to the Kings of France 
and England. 

The appeal was taken up by one of the most 
moving figures in history, the canonized Louis IX. 


106 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


That the most Catholic of centuries should have 
been symbolized in a French king has been a great 
thing both for the monarchy and for Catholicism. 

Born a few years later than the century, he 
seemed to have come into a world unworthy of him. 
He had to bear the heavy inheritance of the here- 
tic Midi, purchased in 1208 by one of the most 
horrible wars in history, and transformed into a 
desert. Where, he might have asked, were the 
beautiful images of European order designed by 
Charlemagne and Gregory VII; where were the 
holy Pontificate of Rome and the Holy Empire? 
They had become, respectively, Guelph and Ghib- 
elline, and it is difficult to say which of the two 
inspired the more horror. 

On his voluptuous terrace at Palermo, sur- 
rounded by Saracen guards, Jewish doctors, Sici- 
lian mignons, and concubines of every race, 
lounged the temporal head of Christendom, re- 
vising the proofs of his last work which bore the 
title: Concerning the Tribe of Impostors, with the 
sub-heading: Moses, Mohammed and Jesus of 
Nazareth. 

As for the pope, it was difficult to recognize the 
Savior’s vicar under the savage mask he had car- 
ried ever since he had crushed the Manicheans. 
He was not half so much interested in a Crusade 
against the heathen as in one against the Emperor. 
To destroy the generation of vipers, as he called 


APOCALYPSE OF SAINT LOUIS 107 


the tragic House of Suabia, had become his sole 
conception. 

In such a world the one object to which a soul 
like that of Saint Louis could turn was a crusade. 
All was sick, in the state, the Church, and doubt- 
less in himself, but on holy soil, all in his person 
might yet work out its expiation. Jesus, Thou 
hast died for me: I may yet die for Thee. It is 
undeniable that this man offered his spotless body 
and pure soul for the crying sin of his own epoch 
and his own Church. 

At the same time, with this mysticism went a 
certain common sense novel in a soldier of the 
Cross. His plan was an expeditionary force into 
Egypt to be followed by an emigration which 
would make that country a base of supplies, point 
d’appui, in a renewed assault upon Palestine. His 
policy and even his campaign were retraced by 
Bonaparte in 1798. 

He first sailed to Cyprus, where he stayed a 
long time, probably to inure himself to the south- 
ern climate. There he amused himself by watch- 
ing the antics of the Mussulman princes, repre- 
sentatives of the Caliph of Bagdad, the Soldan 
of Egypt and the Old Man of the Mountain, who 
came to spy upon the great King of the Franks. 
What they saw was a slight man with golden hair 
and beard who jested gently with his companions 


108 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


and wore upon his surcoat the scarlet cross of 
heroic sanctity. His camp was the usual complex 
of disorders and incongruities. Prostitutes pitched 
their tents near that of the King. 

At length he embarked for Egypt, and landed 
near Alexandria, plunging into the shallow water 
before any of his companions. From there the 
army marched by slow stages to Mansourah. The 
vanguard was led by Robert of Artois, the King’s 
youngest brother, who insisted on trying to take 
the town without waiting for the King. The 
Mamelukes had barricaded the narrow streets, 
and they rained arrows and Greek fire upon the 
assailants. All perished, including the young 
prince. | 

In the meantime the King had crossed the Nile 
and met the Saracens on the other side. In re- 
counting this moment the good pedestrian prose 
of Joinville rises almost to the ecstasy of an Arthur- 
jan epic .. . “The King came up with his battal- 
ions, and a great sound of shouting and trumpets 
and cymbals; and he halted on a raised causeway. 
Never have I seen so fair a knight! For he seemed 
by the head and shoulders to tower above his 
people; and on his head was a golden helm, and in 
his hand a sword of Allemaine.”’ 

In the evening they told him of his brother’s 
death. He made no answer, ‘‘but big tears fell 
from his eyes.” Later he said: ‘I know that he is 


APOCALYPSE OF SAINT LOUIS 109 


in God, His Paradise” but refrained from adding: 
“T would that I too were where he is.” 

The rest of this campaign was horrible. There 
was no chance of going forward, and retreat by 
land or sea became hourly more difficult. An epi- 
demic broke out in the camp, and the Saracens, who 
had vexed the Crusaders continuously by stream 
and shore, at last drove them into a guét-apens, 
and the Crusade was over. For a while it was 
doubtful whether the King himself would escape 
the general massacre. 

The tragedy of the French King had reached 
its climax. He had been rejected by Christians, 
captured, mocked and, as it were, crowned with 
thorns by the heathen princes. All Islam cele- 
brated his failure, and there was more than one 
Christian city, noble Florence, for example, which 
lit bonfires in honor of the happy event. Louis 
cared nothing for all this, only for the failure of the 
Crusade. ‘Had I alone to endure the disgrace and 
the misfortune,” he said after his release, ‘‘and 
had not my sins turned to the prejudice of the 
Church universal, I should be resigned. But alas! 
All Christendom has fallen through me into dis- 
grace and confusion.” 

The modern world so dearly loves “the masters 
of their fate,” the men who get things done; it is 
incapable of understanding, still less of canonizing, 
this fatal king with his touch of Hamlet’s malady, 


110 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


constantly corrected by the heroic grace of God. 
Christianity is not the religion of the strong; it 
is the religion of the weak who will to be strong. 
Nothing is more fascinating in this complex nature 
than its unearthly mysticism, continually modified 
by a sort of sunny good sense and illuminated by a 
shining justice. He was no sacristan, no stained 
glass saint, no slave of the priests, and he knew on 
occasions how to parry the pretensions of clergy- 
men with a firm malice, declaring that “prud- 
homme vaut mieux que béguin.” And how this 
man from the Catholic Middle Age pierces the 
imbecilities of “one hundred percentism” in the in- 
structions which he left to the future Philip III: 
“Dear son, gain the love of thy people for truly I 
should prefer a Scot coming from Scotland to 
govern the kingdom well and loyally to thy govern- 
ing it ill in the face of the world.” 

In the meantime all Syria ran blood. The 
Mamelukes, the captors of Saint Louis, arrived 
burning, slaying and bearing of thousands to cap- 
tivity. One by one the Frankish citadels near the 
coast—Cesarea, Jaffa, Belfort and Antioch—fell 
into their hands. 

For the King of France these things were a 
wound which gave him no peace. To go out there 
again, to endure once more the agonies of that cam- 
paign—the heats, the pestilence, the innumerable 
flies, the certainty of failure, the horror of death— 


APOCALYPSE OF SAINT LOUIS 111 


would have dismayed a more robust mind. His 
mind was supernatural. He could not pray in the 
glories of the Holy Chapel he had built in honor 
of Jesus while the Saracens were slaying his broth- 
ers or forcing them to deny His holy Name. 


Between the viols and the wine, 
I heard a voice descend: 

Ve kneel and hail me as divine; 
Therefore my land defend. 


And then the eternal nostalgia of the Holy Land 
assailed him—the marvelous sadness of the desert, 
the melancholy of those rocky palisades where at 
evening the divine Shepherd had walked. He said 
nothing to his court, but wrote to the Pope that 
he was about to reassume the Cross. 

The Crusade was unpopular to the last extent. 
Even the Pope, a clever man and able lawyer, 
Clement IV, wrote to dissuade Louis from the folly 
of his last adventure. We are only in 1267, but 
already the ugly spirit of the coming epoch, the 
low Middle Ages, was superseding the mystical 
and chivalrous thirteenth century. No one praised 
the King, and even his closest friend, his biog- 
rapher, Joinville, abandoned him. “Of his voyage 
to Tunis,” wrote the worthy man, “I wish to say 
nothing, for God be praised, I was not there.” 

Tunis had been selected as an objective because 


112 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Egypt was inaccurately believed to draw its sup- 
plies from there, and in their ignorance the French 
thought that one could pass easily from one coun- 
try to the other. After loitering on the coast some 
days under a sky of brass, the vanguard advanced 
on Carthage. All that was left of Rome’s rival 
was a single fortress garrisoned by two hundred 
Saracens. These were at once slaughtered, and 
when the King arrived at evening he found the 
place choked with dead bodies, an abominable cas- 
tle standing by itself on a treeless plain, broken 
here and there by pools of pestilential water. 
Sickness soon broke out, attacking the King and 
carrying off his youngest child, a boy, whom he 
greatly cherished. It was, as Michelet said, a sum- 
mons from God, a temptation to die. 

“On his last night, the holy king lifted up his 
hands and said: ‘Beau sire Dieu, have mercy on 
this people sojourning here, and grant them a safe 
return, that they may not fall into the hands of 
their enemies, or be compelled to deny Thy holy 
Name) (32,7 

And a little later, as he was reposing, they heard 
him sigh and say in a low voice: “Oh Jerusa- 
lem ... Jerusalem... .” 

Saint Louis is the complete flower of the Middle 
Ages at their apogee and their last child. After 
him there will be no more Crusades, or rather a 
Crusade will be regarded as a final resort for pro- 


APOCALYPSE OF SAINT LOUIS 113 


ducing revenue; considered as a heavenly adven- 
ture it has outlived its time. The Pisans, with 
the unfailing practicality which distinguishes their 
race, will solve the problem by shipping from 
Palestine a cartload or two of holy earth to be 
deposited in the Campo Santo; a portion of Judea- 
at-home, much more accessible, and infinitely 
more cheap, 


CHAPTER XI 
THE CENTURY OF SAINT LOUIS 


THE epoch of Saint Louis has been called the 
greatest of centuries. It is certainly the period 
in which the Catholic spirit consumed itself with 
its purest flame. By the middle of the thirteenth 
century the power of the Papacy had attained 
its consummation. Secure under its beneficent 
despotism the Church in certain countries had 
too the air of being very close to the hearts of 
the people. It was in this century that the en- 
thusiasm for a new style of architecture raised 
throughout Europe, but especially in France and 
England, those miracles of stone and color, the 
Gothic cathedrals, a mighty expression of com- 
munal feeling wedded to the genius of artists and 
the holy ardors of religion. Under their charitable 
shadow grew up the first associations of learning, 
the universities. The spirit of the Church pene- 
trated everywhere, even in the relations of busi- 
ness and industry. It was surely a great age, but 
an age which lived upon the heights and only the 


heights were in sunlight. 
114 


THE CENTURY OF SAINT LOUIS 115 


Probably the best criterion of what is good in 
an epoch is that proposed by Dr. Walsh in his 
book on the thirteenth century ... “An histori- 
cal period is great in proportion to the happiness 
it provides for the greatest number of men.” And 
yet it is only by a piece of special pleading that 
the thirteenth century can be made to satisfy this 
criterion. I doubt if the greatest number of men 
were very happy during this climactic moment 
of the Middle Ages, as happy as they were in the 
Flavian age of the Empire, for example, under the 
Antonines. If the thirteenth century is ultimately 
great, it is not because it was conspicuously happy 
for all its sacerdotal splendor; it is because it 
produced a great Catholic art under the impetus 
received from a religious renaissance. The most 
successful example of individual happiness in his- 
tory is a product of this century, but he is salient 
only as he stands out, like the relief of a saint in 
an old altar-piece, against the darkness of his 
background. 

He came from those enchanting valleys in the 
region of the upper Tiber, on the borders of the 
old Etruscan desert. The Middle Ages was par- 
ticularly hard for those isolated hill-towns and 
cantons of Assisi, Perugia, Gubbio and Narni which 
the popes had erected as a kind of defensive ram- 
part to protect their own “patrimony” on the 
north. At the first appeal of Francis thousands of 


116 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


souls in this Umbria, so long shut out from its 
natural inheritance of joy, seemed to awake and 
expand in a new matutinal season of love and hope. 
After the year 1209 they could have repeated the 
old words of the Advent canticle: 


Through the tender mercy of our God, 
The day-spring from on high hath visited us! 


Francis was the son of a rich bourgeois of Assisi, 
and his adolescence reveals the same traits one 
ascribes to the decorative and self-assured young 
men one used to see lounging with graceful seren- 
ity on the piazze of Italian towns before the Fascist 
phenomenon. He was, however, innocently ambi- 
tious, overflowing with animal vitality, and gay to 
the point of extravagance. Taken prisoner in one 
of the neighborhood wars between his city and 
Perugia, across the valley, he said to his jailer: 
“What do you think of me?” Then without wait- 
ing for an answer, ‘Brother, I tell you that one 
of these days the whole world will adore me.” 

Innocent and amusing words, but also prophetic 
ones! When he returned to Assisi he found no 
leisure to prepare for the great moment when all 
the world would adore him. His days and nights 
were too preoccupied by all the sports and trivial 
avocations which absorb an ordinary Italian youth 
of good instincts and unquenchable high spirits. 
His very name, Francesco, “the Frenchman,” re- 


THE CENTURY OF SAINT LOUIS 117 


veals him as the practician of the gay science just 
imported across the Alps from the ruined Midi, a 
maker of sirventes and canzonetti, dedicated to 
the love of woman and the love of life. At night 
he promenaded through the city, half undressed, 
flushed by the light of torches. He thought of 
nothing but of becoming a great man, of perpetuat- 
ing the secret of happiness he carried like a falcon 
in his bosom, of surrounding himself with joyous 
poets and dear friends, with “the flame of beauti- 
ful faces.” “I will be a great baron,” he said 
often. 

Then, imperceptibly, a cloud of disquiet be- 
gan to obscure his life. The hard egotism of the 
bourgeois who surrounded him, the miseries of 
the lepers and fugitive serfs and hopelessly poor, 
assailed and penetrated even that irrepressibly 
happy spirit. Pity came, a ghostly figure like that 
mystical Poverty he is seen to espouse in Giotto’s 
painting, and laying her finger on the smiling lips, 
showed him the whole fair tract of the Christian 
world, not as it appears now to the romantic me- 
dievalist, but as it was, and is. That smiling val- 
ley, his own Umbria, bounded by happy hills, 
enameled with gay and simple flowers, appeared 
to him suddenly as a true vale of tears, since man 
alone, amid all that laughing spectacle of nature, 
seemed disinherited and still a prisoner as if no 
redemption had ever taken place. Francis de- 


118 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


termined to repair this anomaly. His conversion 
is more striking than those of Huysmans and Tol- 
stoy, since, in the case of the former, conversion 
was barely distinguishable from superstitious ego- 
ism, while the latter, in professing to love the poor 
a great deal, remained all his life a disillusioned 
aristocrat. Francis not only went to the poor, 
he became poor himself; he identified himself, so 
far as he was humanly possible, with abstract pov- 
erty. Like the Buddhist prince in the Hindoo 
mythos, this son of the gods, who had the best 
reasons for loving life in a Pagan sense, willed to 
love it in a Christian. And this one fact still 
distinguished him from almost all the great con- 
verts and reformers. Christidn gloom was the one 
element in medieval Christianity impossible for 
him to assume and incarnate. He embarked on 
the great adventure of redemption as if it had been 
a kind of lark. Even the most even-tempered of 
medieval churchmen, Saint Antonin of Florence, 
had regarded property as a positive good and pov- 
erty as evil. Francis made himself little with re- 
lief, and embraced poverty gayly as if she had 
been a bride. 

In retelling his familiar story, I have wished to 
indicate, in passing, the two principal notes of the 
Franciscan Church which he founded within the 
Catholic one, and which transformed, to a certain 
extent, the latter, together with the whole thir- 


THE CENTURY OF SAINT LOUIS 119 


teenth century world. These notes are, it seems 
to me, Christian democracy and the religion of 
joy. The Catholic Church, under the egis of the 
Papacy, was at the height of its power in the thir- 
teenth century. Its theology was crystallizing into 
the iron scholastic of Saint Thomas Aquinas. It 
had tasted the blood of heresy in the Albigensian 
Crusade, and its most questionable institution, the 
Inquisition, had just been founded to police and 
enforce a lifeless uniformity. Never again did 
the Church seem disposed to regard with friendli- 
ness, of even sufferance, any revolution in religion. 
By pity and love, Francis effected such a revolu- 
tion. Without theology or scholastic, and with the 
blessing of the Pope, he restored primitive Chris- 
tianity and the Gospel to the lives of men, and in 
doing so, he rejuvenated and popularized the 
feudal and monarchical Church. His Franciscans 
became the leaders of the poor in the universal re- 
volt against feudalism, the labor movement of the 
fourteenth century in England, for example. As 
early as 1210 they intervened between the serfs 
and the barons of Umbria, and forced the latter 
to sign a charter of partial emancipation. Even 
among themselves they revised the monastic ideal, 
which had been monarchical in its principle like 
the Church itself. Many of them were not even 
in orders. They called each other not “father,” 
but “brother.” Catholics like to say that the 


120 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Church abolished slavery, meaning that after the 
advent of the Church slaves were no longer called 
slaves but serfs. But what the Catholic Church 
failed to do, the Franciscan one accomplished. 

It was well for Francis that he effected such a 
revolution in Italy itself, the country of light and 
liberty. In France and the Empire, both just 
emerging from the barbarous mists of the dark 
ages, he might have fared like Jeanne d’Arc or 
John Huss, and gone down in history as a heretic, 
or as a heretic who has only just been rehabilitated 
as a saint. For a moment the fate of the Francis- 
can Church trembled on the knees of those medie- 
val gods, known as the pope and the curia. Inno- 
cent III was dubious as to its orthodoxy, but a 
cardinal, divining the crux of the question, said in 
the pontifical council: ‘“Holy Father, in rejecting 
the request of this poor man do we not reject the 
Gospel of Jesus Christ?” The Pope, acceding, 
blessed the foundation of the Franciscan Order. 
He had then a dream in which he saw his basilica of 
Lateran rocked by a tempest and upheld only by 
“this poor man” who lent his shoulder to sustain 
it. This vision was a true prophecy. Everything 
that was good in Italy—its Catholicism, its poetry 
and, I would almost say, its art—received their 
driving force from the Franciscan movement—the 
liberty of spirit in which Italy treated dogma and 
discipline, her contempt of formal heresy, the love 


THE CENTURY OF SAINT LOUIS 121 


which often carried her to the heights of the Chris- 
tian ideal, the religion of Giotto, Saint Catherine, 
Raphael, Philip Neri and Michelangelo finds its 
first reflection in that of Francis and his regenera- 
ting work of joy. Machiavelli, who was no friend 
to monks, wrote the following lines which are a 
summary of the Franciscan achievement: 

“Tt is necessary that religions renew their youth 
and return to their first principles; Christianity 
would be now completely extinguished if Saint 
Francis had not renewed it and restored it to the 
hearts of men by the poverty and the example of 
Jesus Christ; he thus saved the religion that was 
being compromised by the Church.” 

Finally, Francis restored to Catholicism its prim- 
itive joy, and thus made possible a vital and revo- 
lutionary art. He was a true Meridional, and 
Italian, a poet, and not the least of the flowers 
which sprang up in his path was the first Italian 
Renaissance, the creative, the real one. I can 
never pass that fine, suave, tempered facade of 
Saint Mary of the Flowers at Florence without 
evoking the charmed moment in the Renaissance 
when it paused, gracious as an April morning, be- 
fore advancing into the lush magnificence of mid- 
summer. Christian gloom would seem never to 
have thrown its shadow about those smiling Italian 
churches since Francis expelled it from the penin- 
sula by his apostolate of love and joy. One 


122 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


feels the same sentiment in the painting of the 
early Tuscan school, above all in the supreme 
Giotto, illustrator of the Franciscan legend. Some- 
thing has changed in Christendom and in Christian 
art, and if this profound alteration does not eman- 
ate from the religious renaissance it emanates from 
nowhere. Observe the frescoes of Pisa or Mon- 
reale, where the menacing god of the twelfth cen- 
tury appears on the dull gold of the domes like 
an Oriental despot, repulsing with a gesture of 
malediction the unhappy Christian humanity which 
no longer dared to lay its head upon His shoulder. 
Then consider the Christ of Giotto and Masaccio, 
the God of the Franciscans, walking among the 
flowers, compassionate for the multitude, cherish- 
ing the unpretentious and the poor. He is the 
God restored by Francis to the Church which had 
forgotten him. He is immanent in the lovely Um- 
brian land, the Galilee of Italy, in the Virgilian 
hills, the enchanted waters, the beautiful people 
all of which the divine pantheist assembled and 
reconciled to Him in his canticle of the sun. Be- 
fore Francis, the medieval Christian might well 
avert his eyes, like Saint Bernard, from the danger- 
ous beauty of woods and fountains, still haunted 
by sensual phantoms; from the enervating melan- 
choly of mountains and solitary lakes. The 
melody of water was like the laughter of girls 
bathing; the white birch was very lovely as it 


THE CENTURY OF SAINT LOUIS 123 


leaned to its reflection in lonely pools, but from a 
little distance its beauty was that of nudity. 


When music sounds, then changest thou 
Its silvery to a sultry fire: 

Nor will thine envious heart allow 
Delight untortured by desire. 


Francis came, and all this complex and ferment 
of unnatural desire and unnatural austerity was 
reconciled and stilled. Men worked and created; 
they loved and worshiped with tranquil hearts. 
Giotto, the Pisani, the early humanists like Pico 
and Ficino, harmonized successfully the antique 
beauty of nature with salvation by the Gospel. 
Auroral lights ran from cupola to campanile be- 
cause in sun-intoxicated Umbria a beloved voice 
had repeated the evangelic affirmation: “I have 
come that you may have life, and that you may 
have it more abundantly.” 


CHAPTER XII 
OF ART AND THE CHURCH 


I CAN see a connection between the renaissance 
of Christian art in the Middle Ages and the result 
of the year 1000 which uncertainly ushers in the 
medieval period. Glauber, a chronicler, writing 
in 1050 of the events which took place in his child- 
hood, has this to say: “It was as if the world, 
shaking off its old tatters, hastened to clothe it- 
self in the white vestures of the Church.” After 
1000 European art was like one of those new- 
born babies, deposited by poor women of the 
Middle Ages in the baskets swinging in church- 
porches, and who afterward grow up about the 
sanctuary and in the shadow of the cloister. In 
the homeless turmoil of that chaotic period, the 
artist, all uncertain of his own power and his own 
future, turned to the Catholic Church as to a fos- 
ter-mother, and she became his only home. 

For an obvious reason architecture was the first 
art patronized by the Church. She was obliged to 
find buildings in which to house her sacraments 
and ceremonies. ‘All religious buildings,” says the 


same Glauber, “all cathedrals, parish churches, 
124 


OF ART AND THE CHURCH 125 


village chantries, were transformed by the faithful 
after 1000 into something better.”” This “some- 
thing better’ was the architectural form we call 
the Romanesque. To trace briefly its develop- 
ment it is necessary to go back a little. 

The first Christian churches were merely exten- 
sions of Latin dwelling-houses and public build- 
ings, particularly the Roman law court or basilica. 
The latter was a long, simplified building with a 
flat ceiling and very little window space due to 
the heat and sunniness of the Latin climate. The 
monks who occupied these edifices simply rounded 
the far end into a choir, elevating it from the long 
nave by a flight of steps. In this raised sanctuary 
was placed the high altar, partly closed in by col- 
umns, the whole imitated, in all probability, from 
examples in pagan temples. What they had then 
was an authentic Christian church expressed in 
noble form. The most impressive examples of the 
basilica church to be found in Europe are Sant’ 
Apollinare and San Vitale, both in Ravenna, the 
latter containing that mosaic of the Empress Theo- 
dora and her court so admired by Mr. Clive Bell. 
There are those for whom the Church has never 
improved upon the basilica with its naked and 
superb finality. Enter some dark afternoon, when 
the church is still unlighted, St. Paul the Apostle’s 
in New York City, and see how grand and com- 
plete can be even the suggestion of this earliest 


126 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Christian architecture long before all the fioretti 
of subsequent styles were so much as dreamed of. 

Romanesque really added nothing to this funda- 
mental form save, perhaps, the rounded arch, the 
campanile, or tall thin tower, and the often elab- 
orately sculptured portal. The Romanesque 
churches stayed low in height, thanks to the build- 
er’s fear of instability.. This is the structural reason 
why Romanesque fails to ‘‘soar” and ‘‘aspire heav- 
enward,” to adopt the somewhat sentimental vo- 
cabulary of Gothic enthusiasts. One also likes to 
think that there was something charitable and 
humble in the very principle of those adorable 
Italian churches which kept them close to the earth, 
knit with their children. Like the Daughter of 
Syon in the Song of Songs, they are dark but 
comely. The Gothic style never flourished in 
Italy, and when the first Renaissance dawned in the 
peninsula about 1300, the Romanesque churches 
took on a fresh life, a new spring. The artists and 
decorators of the new age, still profoundly Chris- 
tian in their instincts, took the exteriors and caused 
them to bloom in soft and temperate colors, like 
the facades of the Duomo and Santa Maria No- 
vella at Florence, those gracious milk-white fronts, 
crisped and dappled with a new and unearthly foli- 
age. This is the charmed and too ephemeral mo- 
ment in the Italian Renaissance, so far as archi- 
tecture is concerned. 


OF ART AND THE CHURCH 127 


In the meantime, during the thirteenth century, 
in France and England, a revolution in Christian 
architecture had taken place. The Gothic was 
born. Its essential difference from the style which 
in western Europe it superseded is the ogive, or 
pointed arch, substituted for the rounded one. 
The Romanesque churches had at the outset plain 
flat ceilings, supported by heavy pillars. If, instead, 
you have your arches come to a point, and then 
multiply them indefinitely on and on, the eye is 
always being charmed and coaxed onward and 
upward; if you substitute for rounded windows, the 
one purpose of which is sufficient light, tall taper- 
ing ones blazing with colored glass, or completing 
the edifice with a glowing corolla, a mystic rose— 
it is obvious that you achieve an effect of aerial 
vastness and mysterious color which wholly dazzled 
the thirteenth century, and has, at intervals, en- 
chanted humanity ever since. That famous “as- 
piration” is more than half achieved by a perilous 
geometrical device as elementary as that of a con- 
jurer. Externally, in place of a roof as simple in 
its outline as that of a cottage, you cause your roof 
to be denticulated by a multiplicity of pinnacles 
and spires, and you obtain a general effect un- 
paralleled in its delicacy in spite of the dangers to 
structure. This is what Gothic did; it combined a 
net impression of incomparable grandeur with a 
fascinating captiousness of detail. But it was too 


128 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


good to last. ‘The Greek temple and Roman 
church had, after all, contained the secret of their 
structural stability. The Gothic church depended 
upon props. The appearance of the crutch called 
the flying buttress marked the beginning of the 
end. Those flamboyant, or late Gothic churches of 
the fifteenth century, are almost embarrassing in 
the slenderness of their structure, and, as some one 
has said, the Gothic was not so much superseded by 
the classic revival as crushed by its own inherent 
frailty. 

Sculpture and painting, the next two arts taken 
up by the Church, were for some time neglected in 
the Romanesque and Gothic periods. This can be 
partly explained by the needs of construction. The 
earlier churches were too dark, and the later ones 
too much preoccupied in utilizing structurally 
every available inch of space to afford any scope 
for decoration. The Gothic church, however, af- 
forded certain prized opportunities for the medieval 
sculptor, called in France the zmagier. One of its 
objects was a richly crowded exterior decorated 
with the freest hand so long as the decorations were 
in relief. Under the transparent disguise of relig- 
ion, almost everything, short of actual blasphemy, 
was permitted to the zmagier, and the result was a 
fantastic, and often outrageous, encyclopedia in 
stone, the dominant note of which was realistic. 
Birds, beasts, flora; natural history, science, satire, 


OF ART AND THE CHURCH 129 


fantasy; human traits, human passions and human 
aberrations—everything was depicted with an 
enormously vital and often diabolic verve. In one 
thing only is this naturalistic sculpture inferior to 
the Greek, and that is possibly the absence of 
serenity, partially due to the fact that it was neces- 
sarily a sculpture of draped figures, and the depic- 
tion of nudity was forbidden it. But it lacks 
nothing in vitality, courage and the sense of life. 
“This is the worship of Priapus, in which nothing 
comes amiss, or is to be staggered at, however 
sensual, for all things are but varied manifestations 
of life . . . in valleys amid vineyards and foun- 
tains, among which ‘often the voices of fauns and 
of gods are heard.’”’ Nothing disconcerts the 
imagier, not even the supposed sanctity of his mis- 
sion, and he does not shrink from representing on 
the portals of the Gate of Heaven the incestuous 
amours of the patriarch Lot and the silly misdeeds 
of the Cities of the Plain. 

With the Franciscan renaissance, described in 
the last chapter, plastic art abandoned the portals 
and entered the sanctuary itself. Giotto and his 
friends were not deterred from depicting beside the 
very altar the earthly pilgrimage of the God-Man 
in a style for which it is hard to find adequate 
words, a style simple, homely, popular, realistic, 
and yet, in the last analysis, so unutterably moving. 
Remember that, all things considered, Giotto was 


130 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


not only the greatest of painters; he was also prac- 
tically the first, and that the problem confronting 
him and his successors was not simple. It was, in 
a word, “‘how to bring heaven down to earth with- 
out making earth itself seem too heavenly.” Paint- 
ing, still like a child in the cloisters, had to embody 
emotions wholly unexpressed and perhaps unknown 
to Greece or Rome. In the meantime, Christianity 
had come with its emphasis on suffering and as- 
piration; the Middle Age had come with its reverie, 
its dizzy yearning and its perilous achievement. 
All that had to be expressed. In attempting its 
expression the painters of the first Renaissance in 
Italy continued the humanizing apostolate of 
Francis and restored religion to the people. God 
was again made man, and then, with the discovery 
of the classics, it began to dawn in the medieval 
mind that man too might be a god. The Almighty, 
says the Psalmist, takes no delight in any man’s 
legs; but, in the intention of the fourteenth century 
painters, man should; and he did. The same 
painter was obliged to depict Venus weeping for 
her lost lover and Mary weeping for her lost Son; 
and he did both with an equal and amorous ardor. 
Something unexpected and, it might be thought, 
undesired by the Church was disclosed, and that 
was the beauty of nudity, the nobility of the body 
of man. What began in candid piety culminated 
in the classic adoration of anatomy. And what did 


OF ART AND THE CHURCH 131 


the Church, the patron of the plastic arts, do at 
this juncture? The modern and the ill-informed 
(often the same thing) would like to tell us, and 
often do tell us, that the Church at once withdrew 
her skirts and fulminated in reprobation. As a 
matter of fact, she did nothing of the sort. The 
Church was then the true Catholic Church, still in 
her full vigor of mental and spiritual health, and 
not merely the most ancient and impressive of 
modern puritan sects. Wavering perhaps on the 
verge of decadence as she was, she had not, at that 
date, thrown off one of her most illustrious gifts; 
namely, the holy spirit of art. Accordingly, she 
continued to be the chief patron of painting and 
sculpture, and Michelangelo, who combined both 
expressions, and is perhaps the most daring and 
almost insane exponent of anatomy for its own 
sake, was employed by three successive popes. 

It is fascinating to watch the synthesis, or con- 
flict, of two opposing things—the pagan serenity 
and the Christian aspiration—in the canvases of 
certain of these painters. Benozzo Gozzoli intends 
in all good faith to tell the story of the Magi, the 
three eastern kings who came a long way to worship 
the infant Christ, but it is really the story which 
interests him more than the Epiphany, and, finally, 
it is the costumes and play of expression and play 
of bodies which interest him even more than the 
story. Yet what priest so unreasonable as to scold 


132 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


him for that exquisite odyssey of mountain-pass 
and bushy dell and trim meadow; of negro king and 
delightful perky page-boy; of fantastic proces- 
sional and charming color? It is a whole galleon 
of delicious, puerile experience; it is his own genius, 
so original, sparkling and childlike, that he comes 
to throw at the feet of a Child-God. Donatello 
happens to love the human body as much as any 
Greek in the days of Pericles, and the representa- 
tion of all that Florentine expressiveness, slender 
muscularity, charm and color he so much loved 
goes for what? . . . For the service of the Church 
in whose honor he casts one of his friends as the 
patron-saint of merry England, while the nearest 
apprentice he immortalizes as the adolescent 
David, poet-king of the Catholic liturgy. And Cor- 
regio? . .. To this day, popular religious illus- 
tration, even as it is turned out ad nauseam by the 
machine-made imagination of our poor modern 
Romanists, dates from that amazing virtuoso who 
peopled his own Parma, the valley of violets, with 
wonderful girls and boys. The Church accepted 
it all—robust animal realism, freakish genius, yes, 
and even the equivocal yearning and mystery of a 
Sodoma or a Botticelli, because these artists offered 
up what was most native in them for the love of 
God who has given us the priceless gift of beauty 
that marks us out from the beasts who perish. 
Leonardo’s John the Baptist is a twin-brother to 


OF ART AND THE CHURCH 133 


his Bacchus, a faun from the Syrian deserts, one 
of those figures from a remote mythology seen with 
horror by Saint Anthony. (“Satyrs be somewhat 
like men, but with horns on the forehead.”) Can 
the word “Repent” on those smiling lips be any- 
thing but a paradox? Who knows? There is al- 
ways something ambiguous and unanswered in this 
strange and compelling art which is its most vital 
element, its enduring charm. 

All this time the Church had her own inherent 
art to which all these things—architecture, paint- 
ing, sculpture,—were accessory, a liturgical and 
musical symbolism inseparable from her chief cere- 
mony—the Mass. It may be necessary at this 
point to explain once more what the Mass is. 

Its roots are in the New Testament. In the 
Gospels, Jesus, “the night in which He was be- 
trayed, took bread and wine, and gave them to His 
disciples saying: ‘This is My Body. This is My 
Blood. Eat and drink This in remembrance of 
Me.’ DP) 

It is because Christ told His Church to do what 
He had done that the Mass exists. The rite, as 
we have indicated earlier in this book, loomed, 
at the earliest date, as the chief among the 
Church’s Sacraments, the center of the whole 
Catholic system. Gradually throughout the Mid- 
dle Ages, rising to a climax in the century of 
Thomas Aquinas, the whole religious and esthetic 


134 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


genius of Catholicism revolved about and concen- 
trated in this supreme Sacrifice as, in Raphael’s 
fresco, the entire congregation of popes, kings, em- 
perors, prelates and artists gather in about a bare 
table on which is enshrined a luminous Host. 

Nothing then in the symbolism of the Church 
can be explained without reference to the convic- 
tion expressed in the Mass that God incarnates 
Himself in bread, as formerly He clothed Himself 
in flesh. The words of the Gospel: “Let these 
stones become bread,” are all but literally fulfilled. 
Cathedrals rise to house fittingly a Wafer; the 
stone becomes bread; the bread becomes God. 
The incarnation and passion of Jesus are completed 
and perpetuated by a third mystery—His trans- 
substantiation into the humblest and most popu- 
lar of human symbols. ‘To-day, to-morrow, for- 
ever, the divine drama is enacted in the church. 
The latter, cold and inanimate creature of stone, 
is warmed, transfigured, and itself almost trans- 
substantiated by the unending miracle played 
within its walls. It becomes a living organism, a 
suffering body, a man. The nave, extending its 
two arms, is Jesus on the Cross; in the distant 
choir inclining ever so little from the nave, you 
see His Sacred Head drooping in Its ultimate 
agony, while mistily the Precious Blood is purple 
in the deeps of the painted windows. 

In turn, the liturgical drama is elaborated in 


OF ART AND THE CHURCH 135 


accord with the natural one enacted outside by 
the sun and the seasons. “Except a grain of wheat 
fall into the ground, and die, it shall not bring 
forth fruit.”” In late autumn, at the moment when 
the sower scatters his seed in the sere earth, God 
buries Himself in a human body. The seed, at 
once God and Man, grows up through the weary 
winter months; God in Man suffers and dies. Then 
with the time of lilies, the return of spring, it issues 
triumphantly from the tomb. And at last, in the 
time of harvest, ripened by the divine ray which 
penetrated it from the beginning, it ascends like 
the Virgin at her Assumption. (15 Aug.) 

Unerringly, and with a genius which touches the 
soul, the Church accompanies this tremendous 
drama of nature and spirit in her liturgical year. 
The latter has been compared to one of those 
medieval diadems, studded with jewels and crystals 
which are “the Proper of the Season,” in other 
words, her ceremonies and above all her music— 
“the only coronet chiseled in a metal sufficiently 
precious, an art adequately pure, to place itself 
upon the brows of a God.” 

The liturgical year commences about the first 
of December with the four Sundays of Advent, a 
time of preparation for the birth of Christ on 
Christmas Day. Shortly before Christmas are sung 
at Vespers those great Antiphons which appear to 
concentrate, like the salt of tears, all the yearning 


1386 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


and plaintive expectation of the time. . . . “O 
Sapientia, O Wisdom from on High, reaching from 
end to end, and sweetly disposing all things, come 
and teach us the way of prudence. . . . O King 
of the Nations and Desired One, come and save 
Thy child whom Thou hast formed out of the 
slime.” . . . The climax of Advent is Christmas 
itself, birthday of the Divine Child and the Chris- 
tian Church, and yet that ineffable note of longing, 
dominant in the Advent music is not quenched; 
it can still be heard in one of the most exquisite 
Hymns of the Breviary, the Jesu Redemptor for 
the Vespers of Christmas, a melody, plaintive, deli- 
cate, infinite in its suggestion and vague pathos, 
like the fall of snowflakes as they seem to lapse 
in the voices of boys. 


Remember O Creator Lord, 
That in the Virgin’s spotless womb 
Thou wast conceived, and in her flesh 
Thou didst our frailty assume. 


After an interval, unroll the violet-colored Sun- 
days of Lent when the organs are silent, and no 
bells or glorias may be heard. And then, just as 
all nature seems to withhold yet a moment her 
fruition, we are in Holy Week, ushered in with 
palms, “while on the tender sky a red cross is 
seen, and solemn shouts and cries of despair pro- 


OF ART AND THE CHURCH 137 


claim the scarlet Hymn of Prudentius, the Vexzilla 
Regis Prodeunt.” There follow the somber nights 
when Tenebre, the Office of Shadows, is chanted 
in churches, unadorned and almost unlighted in 
honor of the divine Suffering, when between each 
psalm one of the candles is extinguished, its smoke 
evaporating under the arches, while the choir utters 
that marvelous phrase which awakened the des- 
pairing admiration of Mozart: O Jerusalem, Jeru- 
salem, turn again to the Lord thy God. 

Two days later and all is changed. The Mass 
of Holy Saturday, the most exquisite service of 
the year, is chanted in an atmosphere of subdued 
joy in which is still the accent of tears; the Easter 
Alleluia is again heard for the first time in a 
twelvemonth. Indeed the Gregorian music, on 
this occasion, assumes a Gothic gayety, borrows in 
this Alleluia and in the carol, O Fila et Filie, the 
popular rhythms of the crowd, suggests, as Huys- 
mans said, “‘the sculptured merriment of ancient 
porches.”’ On Pentecost, Feast of the Holy Spirit, 
forty days later, it becomes again solemn and 
pensive. The vestments of the priests, seen from 
the far end of a long nave, smolder under the 
altar lights like red coals under tongues of fire, 
and one hears again the majestic Veni Creator 
and the sequence Veni Sancte Spiritus whose 
rhythm contains a pulsation like that of flames. 
Finally, at the culmination of the year, at the mo- 


138 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


ment when spring becomes summer, there is cele- 
brated the great Feast of the Sacrament, Corpus 
Christi, a white and golden festival wherein is 
concentrated, in a pean of thanksgiving and wor- 
ship, the central dogma of the Church, her affirma- 
tion that Jesus Christ is incarnate and enthroned 
in nature, in the humblest fruits of the earth, 
bread and wine. 

A marvelous symbolism, doubtless, an incom- 
parable fund of art, the Church possessed in her 
great age. To-day, certain of its forms persist, but 
they are almost everywhere neglected or abused. 
“To him that hath not, shall be taken away even 
that which he had.” I have said enough to indi- 
cate, for instance, that I regard the Gregorian 
music, that anonymous treasury of melody, as per- 
haps Catholicism’s greatest claim to esthetic great- 
ness. “Born of the Church, and bred like one of 
her own children in the choir-schools of the Middle 
Ages, plain chant is the mobile and aerial para- 
phrase of the cathedrals, the fluid interpretation 
of the canvases of early painters.” Ask any Cath- 
olic what has happened to the Gregorian chant in 
our time, and you will be met with blank stares. 
It is still sung, he will say. Yes, it is still sung, 
that is, it is either treated as a great bore to be 
gotten through somehow, or as an antiquated toy 
to be rendered so artificially as to rob it of all vi- 
tality; or it is officially bellowed in a manner that 


OF ART AND THE CHURCH 139 


suggests gargling; or it is ignored altogether. That, 
in a few words, is what the modern Catholic 
Church has done with the chief of its in- 
herent arts. What the modern Catholic really 
loves in the way of religious music are vaude- 
ville and nigger-minstrel tunes. In a _ recent 
Catholic periodical, a writer referred regret- 
fully to that glorious Veni Creator for Pentecost 
sung to the air of De Koven’s O Promise Me; toa 
Salutaris, a hymn to the Sacrament, that is to say, 
to Jesus Christ, sung to the tune of Let Me Inhale 
the Fragrant Breath That Round Thy Lip is Play- 
ing, etc. Sometimes the priest in the Mass, having 
finished the Consecration, is obliged to halt the 
Sacrifice until some miserable old woman in the 
singers’ gallery has completed her warbling of 
some musical piggery. Such is Catholic art in the 
Catholic Church of our time. At one end of the 
scale you have the thirteenth century which I have 
just very faultily been attempting to sketch in its 
architecture, sculpture, painting and music, and 
at the other, the vile sexless indecencies of Barclay 
Street and the modern Catholic musicastor who, 
in his special sphere, seems to me no less vile. It 
is, let us admit, a somewhat melancholy anti-cli- 
max for the Church of Gregory the Great and 
Francis, of Giotto and Palestrina. What is the 
reason? Paganism, Protestantism, Catholic Reac- 
tion, Jesuitism, persecution, machinery? It is 


140 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


impossible, in a chapter of this scope, to say. But 
I believe that a Church which has once evolved 
such an art, such supreme liturgical and musical 
affirmations, cannot be dead forever in the sphere 
of these things. One morning Catholic art will 
rise again for those who have been hopelessly 
watching its tomb. 


Che Catastrophe 
[1300-1800] 


FPA Is Fe ok ured | LAND cc ,] ite ae eR ee Bt ea i Sd 


Wis 
SANS (oi 
ane 


y ets 2 AED hy Fare. e's ih tat 
pe ACL SU SARE ER as 


} 





CHAPTER XIII 
DECADENCE 


UnpbeER the grand pontificate of Innocent III, 
patron of the Franciscan movement, the Catholic 
Church was at the height of its prestige. His 
immediate successors were men of similar temper, 
and as the great century drew to an end, the influ- 
ence of the popes stayed fixed and supreme. Their 
greatest triumph in the realm of politics was the 
extinction of their old enemies, the Hohenstaufen 
emperors of Germany who had hemmed them in 
from north and south, from Lombardy and the 
Two Sicilies. When poor little Corradino perished 
on the scaffold in 1268 and Clement IV gave away 
his Sicilian patrimony to Charles of Anjou, Saint 
Louis’ bad brother, Cesar did not venture to rock 
the boat of Peter for nearly three hundred years. 
When the attack came, as it shortly did, it came 
from a very different and eminently orthodox quar- 
ter, the country of the canonized King of France. 
The great medieval Empire, planned by Charle- 
magne and Barbarossa, shrank into mere Austria, 
ruled by a meek Hapsburg by the grace of the 


popes (1273). The popes desired no unity save 
143 


144 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


the moral unity they had done so much to create 
in Europe. On the religious side, this unity was 
for a moment completely realized when Gregory X 
in 1274 had the satisfaction of seeing the two 
Catholic families of East and West, the Latin and 
Greek Churches, united for a moment at his foot- 
stool. Never had the Papacy seemed stronger or 
more popular than in 1300, opening year of the 
new century, when Boniface VIII held the first of 
the Jubilees or Holy Years. And then, as at the 
stroke of an invisible signal, it began to decline, 
and the whole Church with it. 

The subtle change in the European world which 
now begins is the change from the moral power of 
a theocratic super-state to the conflicting relation- 
ships of modern nationalism. Its climax is the 
Protestant Reform of the sixteenth century—in 
part, a nationalist revolt against the Latin suprem- 
acy of the south—and its catastrophe is the French 
Revolution, two centuries after—a movement 
which began with the universal rights of man and 
ended with the universal rights of Bonaparte, 
resisted only by an aged little Italian in a white 
cassock. 

At the beginning of the fourteenth century, 
France and England were no longer half barbarian, 
or feudal countries. The Catholic and civilizing 
process had been going on for almost two centuries. 
In England the Norman and Angevin kings had 


DECADENCE 145 


checked feudalism, inherited the first British Em- 
pire, organized a common law, neither Roman nor 
ecclesiastic, and recognized a more or less demo- 
cratic Parliament: which already balanced nicely 
the power of the executive in a true cooperative 
State. France had won back most of her posses- 
sions from England, and now in the fine hands of 
Philip the Fair, Saint Louis’ grandson, looked 
jealously across the Channel at Saint George and a 
little resentfully across the Alps at Saint Peter. 
Nationalism in its good and bad aspects, with its 
chevaliers and flags, its martyrs and superstitions, 
its Armageddons enduring a hundred years, its 
Jeanne d’Arcs and Queen Elizabeths, had already 
risen in the souls of these two countries to super- 
sede the old medieval and Catholic unity which the 
popes had imposed for two hundred years. Boni- 
face VIII was scarcely the man to keep this armed 
peace. 

Whatever motives, fiscal or political, impelled 
the Pope, that first Jubilee of his in 1300 contained 
an element of powerful poetry. To convoke all 
Christendom to the birthday of a new and dubious 
century, to contemplate as supreme pastor all those 
thousands and thousands of representative souls 
come to kneel at the tombs of the Apostles, and 
this, above all, at a moment when the Church, at 
its climax, paused a dizzy moment, before its de- 
cline, was a grand act worthy of a better man. 


146 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


There is no wonder that the Pope was carried 
away completely by his réle. He allowed himself 
to be carried through this multitude, made up of 
every nation, the triple tiara on his head, preceded 
by heralds with golden trumpets who cried: “Here 
are two swords, the temporal and the spiritual; 
behold, O Peter, thy successor, and thou, O Christ, 
Thy Vicar who is above all kings.” 

The response of the kings to this challenge 
directed against their temporal power was alarm- 
ingly instantaneous. Philip the Fair had already 
excluded priests from the French judiciary and 
composed his parliament entirely of laymen. Con- 
siderably later, Edward III enacted the statutes 
of Provisors and Premunire which deprived a papal 
legate of any administrative authority in the Eng- 
lish Church. Dante wrote his thesis, De Monarchia 
in which he regretted the phantom of the Holy 
Empire and placed his hopes of social peace in the 
Austrian Cesar instead of in the Italian Pope. 

Meanwhile, a furious quarrel broke out between 
Boniface and Philip the Fair over the question of 
whether the French clergy should support the gov- 
ernment by permitting their vast property to be 
taxed. Previous squabbles between Church and 
State had been nothing to this, for this was a dis- 
agreement over money and money meant more to 
the fourteenth century than to the preceding one. 
Money was particularly important to the grandson 


DECADENCE 147 


of Saint Louis. He exacted a hundredth, then a 
fiftieth of the income of clergy and laity alike. 
Boniface protested in his encyclical Clerecis Laicos 
where, in the tone of Innocent III, he upheld the 
immunity of the Church from national interference 
of any sort, especially with the strong-box. Philip 
appealed to his Parlement for support, and the 
French Catholics in a first outburst of that “Galli- 
can” spirit which some centuries later was to cost 
them dear, told him to go ahead and defy the Pope. 
Before Boniface could launch an excommunication, 
Nogaret, the King’s agent in Italy and Colonna, 
an Italian condottiere, broke into the Pope’s palace 
at Anagni, his native town. The bourgeois of 
Anagni rang the alarm bells, but unwilling or 
unable to resist, they too joined in the pillage. The 
pontiff, forewarned, awaited his tormenters with 
fortitude, arrayed in a white cope, the tiara of the 
jubilee on his head. Colonna and the man of law 
insulted and menaced him; the condottiere struck 
the old man repeatedly with his gauntlet. This 
is in 1303. Three years before he had been the 
Pope of the Holy Year who was above all kings. 
After three days the people of Anagni delivered 
him, but too late to save his reason. He was borne 
into the piazza weeping like a child. “If there be 
any good woman,” he said humbly, ‘who will 
bestow on me bread and wine, or even a little 
water, I will give her God’s blessing and mine.” 


148 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Touched by the spectacle, the crowd too wept and 
cried: ‘‘‘Long live the Holy Father.’ ... All 
could enter and speak with the Pope as with any 
poor man.” 

When Boniface died shortly after this, the 
most Christian King of France decided never again 
to incur the risk he had run in dislodging the 
cornerstone of Christian authority. He deter- 
mined to have a pope of his own, so to speak, on 
his own ground. Then began, from 1305 to 1418, 
the so-called Babylonian captivity of the Papacy 
at Avignon, where the pontiffs, for the most part 
Frenchmen, elected by French cardinals, were at 
the complete disposition of the French King. The 
first of these was a timid scoundrel, Bertrand de 
Gott, Archbishop of Bordeaux, who took the name 
of Clement V. His first interview with his master 
is thus described by the historian Villani and sug- 
gests the concordat of an American boss with an 
influential heeler. 

“They heard Mass together and mutually swore 
secrecy. . . . Then the king raised him, kissed his 
mouth, and said: ‘The following are the special 
favors I have to ask of thee; that thou wilt thor- 
oughly reconcile me with the Church, grant me the 
tithe of the French clergy for five years, anathe- 
matize the memory of Pope Boniface and in the 
creation of new cardinals remember certain friends 
of mine. As to the last favor, I reserve it for 


DECADENCE 149 


another time and place, for it is a great and secret 
thing.” This “great and secret thing” was nothing 
less than the destruction and murder of one of 
the greatest of medieval religious orders. The king 
coveted the vast wealth of the Temple, and ac- 
quired it by the simple expedient of burning the 
Templars on a strange charge. 

The Order of the Holy Temple, a kind of mili- 
tary monasticism, dated from the first Crusades. 
It had undergone extreme hardships and performed 
excellent services in the Saracen wars, but even in 
those early days its besetting sin was stigmatized 
by Richard Coeur de Lion, who remarked when 
dying that he left his luxury to the Cluniacs and 
his pride to the Templars. After the Crusades be- 
came a dead issue, the order exemplified in 
Christendom the eternal crusade of the soul against 
temptation, the spiritual combat which the Chris- 
tian wages to his last hour against the enemy 
within himself. It was thought that nothing too 
much could be done in the way of privilege and 
endowment for a body of men which had borne 
the burden and heat of the wars in the East. Con- 
sequently it was, in 1307, enormously wealthy, 
and affiliation with its ranks was sought by the 
greatest potentates, including Philip the Fair him- 
self. Finally, the secrecy with which it was 
wrapped invested it with respect. The Templars 
were the Freemasons of the Middle Age, and their 


150 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


initiations had all the attraction of a powerful 
secret society in which was mingled a vague but 
not unpleasant terror. It was said, for instance, 
that if the King of France found his way into the 
Temple uninvited, he would never find it out. 

I have already suggested that the Catholic re- 
ligion in the Middle Ages, far from being the rigid 
society it afterward became when it had been 
frightened by the Protestant revolt, was, on the 
contrary, extremely elastic. The long indulgence 
accorded to the Albigensian heresy, the bold specu- 
lations of the Paris schoolmen, the freedom of 
conscience and joyous individualism created by 
the Franciscan movement are so many separate 
strains indicating a far greater liberty of thought 
and action within the Church than is generally 
admitted. There is a hint of this eclecticism in the 
mystical epic of the Graal Quest, the shadowy 
intimation of a Church within a Church and also 
beyond it, a hidden and secret church of the initi- 
ate, a church of the Spirit. It is supposed that the 
Templars profited by this comparative freedom 
and abused it. There was, really, a great danger 
in the pride of the Temple Order, both for the 
Church, and, ultimately, for itself. There was 
danger that the neophyte might expect from the 
Order the revelation of a Christianity different 
from that offered by the Church of the crowd, or 
even a different religion. It is even supposed that 


DECADENCE 151 


the ambiguous Gnosticism, crushed in the crusade 
against the Albigeois, survived in this occult com- 
munity, this dark sanctuary hidden behind the 
official altar. All this and worse was, at any rate, 
dragged into the light, thanks to the ingenuity of 
Philip the Fair’s torturers, and though little con- 
fidence can be given to confessions extorted by 
torture, it was precisely in England, where torture 
was not employed against the Templars, that the 
most disconcerting revelations came to light. 
Human nature does not essentially change in its 
various social revolutions, especially in a body of 
celibates, half monks, half soldiers, exposed to 
the temptations of a distant country, a country of 
slaves whose religion does not exclude the worship 
of the senses and the utmost exaction of pleasure. 
The supernatural chivalry of the Templars, their 
too pure and cold ideal, was not made to sustain 
them after the failure of the Crusades; left without 
a mission in the world, they had nothing to fortify 
them but their excessive pride. And this pride 
concealed strange impulses, fantastic passions. 
. . . The associations of a male chivalry, the con- 
tempt of women, the age-long contact with the 
burning and tolerant East, where everything is 
permitted, worked havoc with the reputation of 
the Order. In England the boys had an unprint- 
able saying regarding the Templars which they 
called out publicly to each other in the street. 


152 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


It was not, of course, because of mutual prosti- 
tution and blasphemy that Philip the Fair, fol- 
lowed by other princes, suppressed the Order, but 
because it was too rich, and the result of the sup- 
pression was the income from nine thousand 
manors which reverted to the state. The most 
tragic element in this case is that it was once 
more the Church slain by the Church. In the 
affair of Boniface VIII the French bishops had 
followed the King against their spiritual father. 
The Temple, denounced by the clergy, was finally 
abolished by the pope. This suicide of Catholic 
Christendom is nowhere so manifested as in the 
almost insane lamentations of Dante. Everything 
in which men had believed — papacy, empire, 
chivalry, the crusade—seem to be traveling down 
the same black road to dissolution. The true 
Middle Ages are already over in the fourteenth 
century. 


CHAPTER XIV 
GERSON 


THE time has come in this history for a little 
comic relief, and the latter is abundantly supplied 
by the extraordinary doings connected with the 
so-called Babylonish Captivity of the popes at 
Avignon, followed by its stranger sequel, the great 
Schism. We have seen the French Vicar of Christ, 
Clement V, taking up his residence in the ener- 
vating city on the Rhone at the bidding of Philip 
the Fair, meekly anathematizing the memory of his 
predecessor, sacrificing the Templars, and behav- 
ing in general as a pontifical valet to the House of 
France. From Clement’s pontificate to the re- 
turn of Gregory XI to Rome, seventy years later, 
Seven French popes “ruled from the wind-swept 
heights, and in the sunburnt, luxurious palace of 
this false Rome.” Several of them were good 
men, but their situation neutralized their personal 
holiness by identifying them with the Valois mon- 
archy, a connection which lowered immeasurably 
the respect due to the Papacy as an international 


force. In the meantime, the true Rome lay deso- 
153 


154 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


late and neglected, or became the battlefield for 
the visions of poets like Petrarch and of operatic 
tribunes like Rienzi. 

In 1338 broke out a hundred years’ struggle 
between the two first nationalist states of Europe, 
France and England, over a variety of sonorous 
causes, but, in reality, over wool. Love of money 
and murder for its sake seem to be the keynotes of 
the mercantile fourteenth century. The outbreak 
of the Hundred Years’ War completed the embar- 
rassment of the Avignonese popes. They were in 
the position of hired servants to one European 
power, and against this power half Europe was 
arrayed, England and the English Church at the 
head. Their impulse now was to escape from 
Avignon, “the exceeding high mountain,’”’ where 
they had yielded to temptation for the sake 
of a little ease. An exquisite apparition of the 
late Middle Ages, Saint Catherine of Siena, ap- 
peared like an angel of peace in their voluptuous 
palace on the banks of the Rhone, entreating the 
Pope to return to his patrimony and be again the 
father of all Christians. Gregory XI yielded, and 
on January 15, 1377, sailed up the Tiber to Saint 
Paul’s on the Ostian Way, where the great Apostle 
had been slain, and so entered the eternal town. 
The Pontifical Mass was again chanted at the 
Lateran, mistress and mother of churches, amid 
the world’s applause. One year later the Pope 


GERSON 155 


died, and his death opened an immediate way to 
the great Schism. Although a successor to the 
dead Pope was at once elected, the same cardinals 
who had elected him assembled a little later and 
bestowed the Papacy upon a disreputable soldier- 
priest, Robert of Geneva, who returned to 
Avignon. There were now two supreme pontiffs, 
an Italian and a French, recognized by the various 
European powers in accordance with their political 
sympathies. For France and her immemorial ally, 
Scotland, the true Vicar of Christ was Robert of 
Geneva at Avignon. For all who took sides 
against France in the war the true Pope was at 
Rome and the best Catholic Ono has since 
rallied to that view. 

It was generally believed that the disasters of 
the war were a judgment on France for having 
introduced schism by the Captivity, and continued 
it by the recognition of Robert of Geneva. Peace 
then was the obvious remedy, peace in the Church 
between Rome and Avignon, by a simultaneous 
retirement of both claimants; European peace be- 
tween France and England. This was the con- 
summation universally desired and on the lips of 
every one, even the French. Michelet says that it 
was the common family prayer taught of an eve- 
ning by mothers to their little ones. Nowhere is 
this longing more manifested than in the sermons 
and remarkable personality of a great French 


156 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


priest, Jean Gerson, Rector of the Sorbonne, or 
University of Paris, who was to play a command- 
ing role in the Counciliar movement which is the 
subject of this chapter. With what lyricism he 
celebrates the great gift of peace in one of those 
hopeful intervals when it was believed that both 
Popes would retire: 


“‘Allons, allons, sans attarder, 
Allons de paix le droit sentier. 


Lift up your hearts, my brothers. Give yourselves 
up in contemplation of the glorious gift of peace. 
“Veniat pax!” 

France and England were easier to reconcile 
than was the Papacy. The English may not have 
desired concord, but their King did; at least 
Richard II signed, in 1396, a truce with France 
for twenty-eight years. Then the European 
princes turned their attention to the Schism. By 
rights it should have terminated two years before, 
in 1394, when the French Pope, Robert of Geneva, 
died. At once the French King, Charles VI, wrote 
to the cardinals at Avignon to suspend election, 
but they paid no attention and proceeded to elect 
a hard-headed Spanish prelate, Pedro de Luna, 
who became Benedict XIII, making many voluble 
promises that he would retire just as soon as the 
peace of the Church made retirement possible. In 
the meantime, the Roman malcontents picked out 


GERSON 157 


an aged Venetian, Gregory XII, who also pledged 
himself to abdicate at the proper moment. The 
difficulty was that neither Pope would take the 
first step. The Schism merely received a fresh 
lease of life. 

Then began the , extraordinary diplomatic 
odyssey of Benedict XIII at Avignon. A solemn 
embassy, headed by the French King’s uncles, the 
Dukes of Berry, Burgundy and Orleans, and ac- 
companied by a learned doctor of the Sorbonne, 
repaired to Avignon to wheedle the Pope into keep- 
ing his promises. He responded admirably, pro- 
testing that abdication and the peace of the 
Church were closest to his heart. For all that, he 
showed no signs of retiring. After wearing out 
the princes with fine words, he got rid of them 
by the simple expedient of burning the bridge 
connecting Avignon with Villeneuve-le-Pape, 
where they were staying. The Pope promised to 
rebuild the bridge, but he never did, and the 
princes, disliking the prospect of daily conferences 
by ferry, gave up the struggle and left the Pope 
master of the field. In Italy also the aged Vene- 
tian gave every indication of living to a hundred. 

To increase the misery of Christendom, the 
Hundred Years’ War was now resumed. ‘The 
English King, Richard II, was unexpectedly de- 
throned by his cousin, Bolingbroke, and the new 
dynasty of Lancaster renewed the cruel struggle 


158 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


with France this time to the death. France had 
introduced the Schism; she had failed to repair 
it; very well, she must pay the price for disrupting 
Christendom by becoming an English province. 
So argued that fox-hunting Anglican hero, Henry 
V, and the nationalist English Church, with her 
usual disregard for the general interest, patriot- 
ically followed suit. Shakespeare has hit off the 
selfishness of the English clergy admirably in the 
opening scene of his war play, Henry V. Peace 
which had seemed to dawn a moment was further 
away than ever. ‘She could not compose the af- 
fairs of Europe, for she did not dwell in men’s 
hearts; never were they less pacific, more dis- 
tracted and divided by pride, violent passions and 
mutual hates.” 

The European powers were now engaged in 
tearing each other’s throats and had no time to 
devote to healing the Schism, so it was the turn 
of the Church to heal itself. Langenstein, a Ger- 
man theologian at the Sorbonne, in his Concilium 
Pacis, written years before, had suggested an as- 
sembly of the whole Church to decide between 
the two rival Popes. Both old men were now 
reduced to the status of fugitives wandering up and 
down their respective maps, Benedict XIII in 
southern France, Gregory XII in the Peninsula. 
The Council of Pisa, which convened in the sol- 
emn Duomo of that city March 25, 1409, was the 


GERSON 159 


first manifestation of the Counciliar Movement 
to supersede the Papal Supremacy. Its heart and 
soul was the French priest, Gerson. It was he who 
advanced the doctrine that the Catholic Church 
could exist independently of a Pope, and that the 
latter should be subject to General Councils, 
similar to those of Nicea, Ephesus and the others 
in the fourth and fifth centuries. In short, the 
Papal Supremacy was no longer held the corner- 
stone of the Church’s Catholicity. How important 
is this novel point of view expressed by Gerson 
need not be pointed out. The claim to a real 
Catholicity on the part of non-Roman Churches 
to-day, the Greek, the Anglican, etc., rests on no 
other basis, and Gerson, good Catholic as he was, 
prepared, in a doctrinal sense, the Protestant revolt 
more than a century later. The Council of Pisa 
deposed simultaneously the two old rivals, and 
elected a Greek Franciscan, Alexander V, in their 
place. Then occurred an unexpected and comic 
dilemma. Both the old Popes refused to resign. 
As if two Popes were not bad enough, there were 
now three, and this was all that was accomplished 
by the Council of Pisa. 

Gerson had momentarily failed, but undismayed 
he worked on, preparing the great Council of Con- 
stance, which was ‘‘to bind the hands of the chief, 
recognized as infallible, and proclaim him supreme 
head of the Church which reserved the right to 


160 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


judge him.” The result of his labors, which as- 
sembled in the little city of Constance November 
4, 1414, was something more than an ecumenical 
council; it was a glowing pageant of the Middle 
Age in embryo. Church and State stood there 
arrayed in an unforgettable splendor, enhanced by 
the full sunset of an era which was going down 
in darkness, offset by a secular magnificence. 
One hundred thousand persons poured into the 
small town. There were present cardinals and 
bishops rustling in scarlet, purple and cloth-of- 
gold copes, Oriental patriarchs, mitered abbots, 
doctors of the canon law, generals of the mendicant 
orders, and, to cap the spectacle, the new holy 
Roman Emperor in his apostolic robes, holding the 
scepter and the globe which symbolized the in- 
heritance of Cesar, the whole civilized world. ‘It 
was a fair, a camp, a forum of debate, diversified 
with ceremonial as august as Roman and medieval 
tradition could prescribe.” 

During the fourth session, Cardinal Zabarella 
proclaimed the famous decree which declared the 
Council superior to the pope. Two of the three 
Popes were deposed, and the remaining one, the 
aged Venetian, was induced to resign. A neutral, 
Martin V, was elected, gave the Council his formal 
approval, and then dissolved it with a sigh of relief 
on April 22, 1418. Captivity and Schism were 
alike at anend. As for the old warhorse, Benedict 


GERSON 161 


XIII, who had already run kings and councils such 
a race, he refused to accept the degree of deposi- 
tion, and withdrew into a Spanish fort, where he 
braved the Council, judged his judges, saw them 
pass away as he had seen so many others, and 
died unconquered at nearly a hundred years of 
age. 

After the Council, Gerson retired to Lyons, a 
city, says Michelet, which, with its somber streets 
that scaled the sky, was a better place of retreat 
than any solitude of the Tyrol. ‘Here he expiated 
by monastic docility his long domination over the 
Church, enjoying the happiness of obeying, the 
peace of having no longer a will of his own.” It 
is said that in the latter years of his life he could 
bear only the company of young children. With 
them he forgot scholasticism, and learned sim- 
plicity. ‘Simplicity and purity,” says the /mita- 
tion, “‘are still two wings by which we can raise 
ourselves above the world.” 

Peace was thus restored to the Church, but not 
the purity it had forfeited during this edifying 
period. The new line of popes continued to live 
quietly at Rome, modernizing the city and pre- 
paring there an appropriate setting for the classical 
Renaissance in its full summer-tide. At the same 
time with an equal discretion they had an eye to 
the enlargement of their State, determined that 
never again they should be reduced to the position 


162 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


they had occupied during the Captivity. The 
temporal power also took a new lease of life during 
this period. Martin V and his successors, at the 
beginning of the fifteenth century, prepared the 
domination of the Borgias and theirs at the cen- 
tury’s close. 

The Middle Age was definitely at an end. 
France and England had emerged from the Hun- 
dred Years’ War absolute monarchies, modern 
states. The most characteristic creation of 
medievalism, the Gothic church, was expiring like 
a charming but elderly coquette, surrounded by all 
the wildest extravagances of devotion. There is a 
great charm in these flamboyant churches at Bourg 
and elsewhere, but it is the charm of languor and 
ruin; all vitality has exhausted itself and fled from 
those fantastic forms. Medieval art, rejected and 
weary, rallies itself in a final effort, and raises its 
own tomb in the Church of Brou. It is not merely 
Philibert and Marguerite of Savoy who sleep in 
that long marble shroud; it is a whole four hundred 
years, the ancient faith, the lost love, all the hopes 
and poetry of the past, 


CHAPTER XV 
THE BORGIAS 


“BEHOLD I bring a flood of waters upon the 
earth . . . O Italy, O Rome, I am going to de- 
liver you into the hands of a folk who will efface 
you among the peoples. I see them descending 
from the mountains like lions a-hungered.”’ 

So prophesied Savonarola from the pulpit of 
the Duomo at Florence in 1481, and four years 
later, on the 31st of December, 1484, a French 
army under Charles VIII entered and occupied 
the Holy City. The defile of troops was so pro- 
longed that it ended after nightfall in the light of 
flambeaux. They had come, ostensibly to support 
a French claim over the two Sicilies against the 
Spaniards, but actually to annex the whole penin- 
sula to the French power, and this with the en- 
couragement of many Italians who saluted the 
French King as the moral deliverer of Italy from 
a pagan renaissance and a pagan pope. The 
latter, Alexander VI (Borgia), a handsome, 
affable man of fifty, watched with extreme un- 
easiness the passing of the deliverer from the 


port-holes of Hadrian’s tomb. | 
163 


164 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


The Borgias were of Spanish origin. One of 
them, Calixtus III, had amassed an immense for- 
tune for the purpose of a crusade which never 
came off. This fortune passed to his nephew, 
Cardinal Roderigo Borgia, who was thus enabled 
to purchase the pontifical throne which he ascended 
as Alexander VI. 

During the previous two centuries the control 
of the popes, both over the Church and over their 
own little Roman State, had suffered almost irrep- 
arably by their captivity in France, and the suc- 
ceeding breach in Catholicism known as the great 
Schism. A new era had begun with the election 
of Martin V at Constance in 1418. From Con- 
stance to the sack of Rome in 1527 is almost a 
hundred years. It was the era of triumphant 
nationalism in politics, of the high Renaissance in 
the arts; the era of Machiavelli and Michelangelo. 
During this century the popes took the step of 
consolidating their position as sovereigns in Italy 
by extending the papal State through every means, 
fair and foul. At the same time the contrast 
between their official character as heads of the 
Church and their greed and immorality as Italian 
princes so shocked the European world, particu- 
larly in the north, that it is one of the contributing 
causes of the two reformations of the sixteenth 
century. The Spanish adventurer, Borgia, is 
usually taken as the culmination and monstrous 


THE BORGIAS 165 


symbol of this political expansion and moral depth 
in the Papacy’s history; so I have taken his name 
as a heading for this chapter. 

His morals were, after all, not much worse than 
those of other cardinals, and he was sincerely 
devoted to the prosperity of the Church, at least 
in its financial aspect. This did not prevent him 
from showing a commendable attention to the 
prosperity of his own family, which was numerous. 
By his mistress, Donna Vanozza, he had four chil- 
dren, two of whom, the famous Cesare and Lu- 
crezia, have been excessively celebrated in scan- 
dalous history like their parent. Cesare was 
cardinal-bishop, Duke of the Romagna, and 
Captain-General of the Church. Lucrezia was 
popular at Rome for her sweetness of disposition 
and her piety. The Pope himself was a religious 
man in his moments. He had a special devotion 
to purity, restricted to the person of the Blessed 
Virgin. It was he who instituted the custom, now 
all but universal, of saluting the Mother of Christ 
three times a day by ringing a church-bell and 
murmuring the salutation of the Angel Gabriel. 
Catholics owe this charming habit to the “mon- 
ster” for whom they themselves have been as se- 
vere as any one. It would be curious to have 
seen the Holy Father, on his way to some sensuous 
banquet in the apartments of his pious daughter, 
arrested by the soft peal of a hundred, church-bells 


166 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


long enough to murmur: “O Mother of God, pray 
for us sinners, now and in the hour of death.” 

This memorable pontificate came to crown an 
astonishing series of bad popes. Paul II, who 
disliked Greek literature, put to the torture several 
Roman academicians, suspected of having com- 
mented the dialogues of Plato. Fortunately he 
was the last of his breed, at least in this respect, 
for certain of his successors carried their enthu- 
siasm for Greek morals to a point which would 
have astonished Alcibiades. Sixtus IV, a friar by 
origin of the Order of Saint Francis, closed the 
Vatican to women, and surrounded himself with 
pages and mignons. These youths, on attaining 
their majority, became bishops and cardinals, 
pastors of the Church. All these worthy pontiffs 
showed, moreover, a marked tenderness for their 
own progeny, and their great preoccupation was 
that of carving from the body of Italy princi- 
palities for their natural sons. So bent were they 
upon this business that insecurity and disorder in- 
creased daily in their own capital. At the death 
of Innocent VIII, Alexander’s predecessor, violent 
crimes at Rome averaged a total of two hundred 
a fortnight. The new Pope had the merit of 
restoring a little decency to this inferno. He was 
severe upon crime, except those committed by his 
own children. 

He was also one of the few men in Italy who 


THE BORGIAS 167 


evinced any patriotic emotion at the invasion by 
the French. It has been suggested that the 
famous Lorenzo the Magnificent, tyrant of Flor- 
ence, might have rallied his countrymen against 
the French, but Lorenzo had died two years before, 
1484. Florence had fallen into the hands of a 
mad monk, Savonarola, who disinherited Lorenzo’s 
three sons; dedicated the Republic to Christ; wel- 
comed the French as moral crusaders; and heaping 
together the whole output of the Florentine Renais- 
sance on which he could lay hand—paintings, 
manuscripts, busts—burned it in the public square. 
This sincere fanatic seems to have been mainly 
inspired by an insane hatred of the Borgia Pope. 
Alexander tolerated him a long while, as Leo X 
tolerated Luther, but when the French were safely 
out of the way, the disillusioned Florentines de- 
nounced him to the Inquisition, and he was burned 
as a rebel to the Holy See and a heretic. The first 
was true in a sense, but it was most unjust to burn 
him as a heretic. He was a very good Catholic, 
indeed; in his instinctive hatred of art he was a 
Catholic of quite a modern type. 

The French and Savonarola out of the way, it 
was the turn of the Pope, or rather that of his 
formidable son, the unfrocked Cardinal of Va- 
lencia. And here it may be necessary to warn the 
reader against swallowing whole in the manner of 
that ingenuous and shallow historian, the late 


168 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


J. A. Symonds, everything that was written about 
Alexander by retailers of clerical tittle-tattle, like 
Burchard and Infessura. In the first place, Alex- 
ander and his family had the most bitter personal 
enemies, from Cardinal della Rovere, the Pope’s 
deadly rival and successor, down to the puritan 
Savonarola. In the second place, these diarists, 
these industrious scribes, were Renaissance writers 
with high literary pretensions and a craze for an- 
tiquity, a veritable itch to write as closely as pos- 
sible, like the matchless Suetonius, the divine Dio. 
The great stock-in-trade of those worthy Latins 
had been the orgies, the enormities, the picturesque 
perversions of the Cesars. Very good; if the good 
Don John Burchard, O.S.B., and the witty In- 
fessura could not produce a pontiff as luxurious 
as Hadrian, an Apostle as depraved as Tiberius, 
they might as well throw away their impotent 
quills; posterity would have none of them, and 
the great Goddess of Fame would draw away from 
them her skirts. One could not survive in those 
lists without being in the most romantic sense a 
pretty good liar. 

When all is said about premeditated exaggera- 
tions, it must be admitted, however, that the Pope 
Alexander VI and his cardinalitial creatures al- 
lowed nothing in heaven or earth to stand in the 
way of a good time. I have always rather liked 


THE BORGIAS 169 


this description of a Roman holiday arranged by 
Pietro Riario, the papal “nephew,” raised at 
twenty-six to the dignities of Cardinal Patriarch 
of Constantinople iz partibus infedelium and 
Archbishop of Florence. The Piazza of the Holy 
Apostles was partitioned into apartments hung 
with white and crimson velvets. All the utensils 
were of silver down to the vilest. The air of this 
improvised banquet hall was refrigerated by 
punkas, and on a column in the center stood a boy, 
completely naked, his body sprinkled with a dust 
of gold, who poured cool water from an urn. 
During the dinner, Florentine mummers played an 
interlude representing Susanna and the Elders, 
alternating with the Diverting Attempt on the 
Chaste Joseph by the Wife of Potiphar and the 
Religious History of Saint John the Baptist and 
the Daughter of Herodias. The youthful but most 
eminent Cardinal-Archbishop moved among his 
guests with the hauteur of a Cesar and the grace 
of a god. 

Morally, the Papacy reached its nadir during 
this pontificate. Alexander was, after all, only 
a brilliant Italian condottiere who used the Church 
to accomplish his political and personal ends. He 
made his bastard a Cardinal and then unmade 
him; his daughter was regent of the Vatican. He 
gave the newly discovered America to the Span- 
iard, and through his son attempted to found a 


170 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Borgia dynasty in central Italy. He instituted 
the Angelus, and established the Censorship, with 
its corollary, the Index. He made a treaty with 
the Sultan of Turkey, and entertained the latter’s 
nephew, Prince Djem, at Rome, where the Su- 
preme Pontiff and the Moslem princelet with their 
respective harems held court side by side in the 
same palace. When Faenza was captured, in 
1501, the two young Manfredi, Astorre and his 
brother, were sent on to Rome where rumor cred- 
ited them with having endured the last outrages. 
‘“Astorre, che era minore di dicotto anni, e di 
forma eccelente . . . saziate la libidine di qual- 
cuno.” Whether the Pope or Cesare are intended 
is uncertain, perhaps both. The arts of murder 
and rapine have never been so nonchalantly exer- 
cised as by the younger Borgia. When the Pope’s 
favorite irritated him he stabbed him while the 
unhappy youth clung for safety to the Pope’s 
robes, and the blood from the blows repeated by 
Cesare spurted in the Pope’s face. The next vic- 
tim was his own brother, the young Duke of 
Gandia, whose body, perforated with wounds, was 
discovered in the Tiber by a fisherman and carried 
before the horrified father. Alexander was an im- 
possible Pope, but he was not essentially a bad 
man. He refused food for three days, at the end 
of which he announced that he was a changed 
being and begged for the prayers of the curia. 


THE BORGIAS 171 


But the same paternal feebleness which had been 
revolted by the murder caused him to forgive and 
take back the murderer. For a time the Christian 
Church was a fief in the hands of Cesare Borgia. 

It is a striking moment, but only a moment. 
The story that Alexander died from the same 
poison he had prepared for several of his cardinals 
seems a little Elizabethan, but die he did, and the 
Papacy passed into the hands of his bitter enemy. 
Cesare was chased from Italy, and the House of 
Borgia never contributed another Pope, though it 
produced a distinguished saint, Francesco Borgia, 
General of the Jesuits. 

Julius II was even a worse Christian than Alex- 
ander in that he loved nothing but war and fight- 
ing if it were not the Apollo Belvedere. He laid 
about him right and left, breathing wrath and 
fire, excommunicating persons and states at the 
slightest provocation and conducting the siege of 
Mirandola in person. This pontifice terribile, as 
the curia called him, was the Bonaparte of the 
Temporal Power. With the vanity of the born 
parvenu he wished to be buried in the largest 
church of Christendom hard by the tomb of his 
first predecessor, Saint Peter. Accordingly the 
old basilica, which thirty generations of Catholics 
had visited, was ruthlessly pulled down, and the 
Pope called upon the foremost classic architect, 


172 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Bramante, to build him a new and grandiose 
church. Without gifts, especially from the rich 
northwest, Bramante could never fulfill the Pope’s 
mania for grandeur, and these gifts were sought by 
the system of indulgences, that is, pardons for 
sins committed in exchange for cash. “Questions 
of morals, finances, religion, national differences,” 
says the Catholic historian, Barry, “were brought 
to a definite and dangerous burning-point by the 
indulgences sold to erect the new Saint Peter’s.” 

Under Leo X, the successor, came the catastro- 
phe. He was the youngest of the three Medici, 
expelled from Florence by Savonarola, a portly 
and pleasant gentleman, passionately devoted to 
the fine arts, especially that of living. Reforma- 
tion was in the air, and since the popes were pre- 
occupied with statues and chefs rather than with 
reform, the prospect shifted in the north to a 
rising wind of revolution. There the late medieval 
traffic in religious things, and especially the sale 
of indulgences, had produced the deepest disgust. 
It was Shaw, I think, who remarked that Anglo- 
Saxons prefer their salvation at the maximum of 
cheapness. All this rising rumor of trouble did 
not affect the urbane Leo. After the ceremonies 
of encoronation were over he took the arm of a 
cardinal and backer, remarking with a charming 
smile: “Well, dear son, since God has given Us 


THE BORGIAS 173 


the Papacy, let Us enjoy it.” This contentment 
was so profound as to be unperturbed by the ad- 
vent of Luther. ‘Monks’ quarrels,” he said, when 
he learned that half Germany was irrevocably lost 
to the Catholic Church. 


CHAPTER XVI 
LUTHER 


To complete the largest church in the world, 
Leo X had need of more funds, and to those who 
gave him money he accorded more indulgences. 
In 1517 a German monk named Martin Luther, 
professor of theology at the University of Witten- 
berg in Saxony, began by attacking the sale of 
indulgences, and ended by tearing down in north 
Germany the entire Catholic edifice of sacraments, 
priests, bishops and Papal Supremacy. 

Before 1517 the Catholic Church had not faced 
any very serious opposition in the West. The 
intransigence of feudal princes, like the German 
Cesars and Philip the Fair, did not involve religion. 
Heresies like the Hussite and Lollard movements 
in the fourteenth century were local in character, 
and with the aid of the civil power, were put down 
with relative ease. The most formidable of them, 
the Albigensian Church, was deeply infected with 
elements that were not Christian at all. But in 
the Lutheran movement the Church had to face 


an opposition, backed by the civil power, which 
174 


LUTHER 175 


protested against her in the name of her own 
founders. In fact, Protestantism may be defined 
as a Christian heresy. 

Luther was its first voice. He was of peasant 
stock, a monk in his teens, and his point of de- 
parture was an extremely morbid anxiety about 
his own soul. From his cloister he looked out 
to see how other people in Germany carried it 
off, and what he saw was a panorama of masses, 
pilgrimages, processions, relic-mongering, pardon- 
mongering, sounding brass and tinkling cymbals, 
empty shows and hollow acts. He felt all the dis- 
gust for the fringes and accidents of Catholicism 
experienced by a man attempting rather vainly to 
achieve what William James called a religion of 
healthy mindedness. The only thing that mat- 
tered, according to Luther, was an immediate 
relationship of the soul with Christ; this he called 
“justification by faith.” All the externals of 
Catholicism came between a man and its natural 
objective, and among such externals Luther placed 
the hierarchy and the sacraments, all but one. A 
good knowledge of Saint Paul prevented him from 
altogether throwing over the central doctrine of 
Catholicism, the real presence of Christ in the 
Eucharist; none the less he modified it. The 
bread and wine do not change, he said, but God 
enters them as fire enters a bar of iron when it is 
hot. This theory is called consubstantiation. 


176 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


“Thus the Catholics ate God without bread; the 
Lutherans ate God with bread; soon afterwards 
came the Calvinists, who ate bread without 
God.” * 

When the German princes and people asked 
Luther what they were to substitute for a visible 
Church and an infallible pope as a guide of life, 
Luther replied that they might substitute the Holy 
Scriptures, especially the New Testament. If 
he had told them to substitute himself, like 
Mohammed, he could not possibly have committed 
a more illogical error. It is obvious that a man 
will find in the Bible exactly what he brings to it; 
in short, that there will be almost as many little 
religions as there are Bible readers. This is pre- 
cisely what has happened to Protestantism from 
Luther on. 

An enthusiasm for the Fathers, especially for 
Saint Paul, caused Luther to draw from the latter 
some curious ideas about destiny which led him 
well along the same insane road that Calvin was 
to follow to the bitter end. The soul, he said, can 
only be united to God by a sudden supernatural 
infusion of grace, obtained by faith. Many souls 
are not apparently favored in this respect; hence 
it is obvious that God does not wish every one to 
be saved, and even damns a few unlucky ones with 
great complacency. This startling theory did not 


* Voltaire. 


LUTHER 177 


chill, however, the enthusiasm of Luther’s German 
converts, none of whom would admit that they 
were damned in advance, while the majority was 
attracted by the prospect of salvation dirt-cheap 
and even gratis. 

Armed with these doctrinal novelties, Luther 
presented himself before the Imperial Council at 
Worms (1521), consisting of the Hapsburg Em- 
peror, Charles V, the papal legate, and all the 
principal dignitaries of the Holy Roman Empire. 
His courage at this moment has been the repeated 
subject of history and painting, but he knew very 
well that several great men in the Diet were on 
his side, and for an excellent cause. The Church 
was extremely unpopular in Germany for the sim- 
ple reason that it was extremely rich. If all that 
mattered in God’s world were justification by faith, 
then there was no need for the Church, and if 
there were no need for the Church, its vast wealth 
could not possibly flow anywhere but into the 
pockets of the princes. Frederick II had suggested 
this in the thirteenth century, but it took fully 
three hundred years to sink in. It is perhaps the 
most powerful reason for the success of the Refor- 
mation in Europe. 

Having been given a fair hearing and a chance 
to retract, Luther was placed under the ban of 
the Empire by Charles V, who thought, like Con- 


178 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


stantine, that there should be only one religion in 
his vast and clumsily wielded realm. But the 
Emperor had no sooner departed to his other king- 
dom of Spain than all north Germany eagerly 
espoused the Lutheran religion, and the example 
of north Germany was soon followed by the Scan- 
dinavian countries. Luther found himself the 
prophet of the north. _He soon imitated the pope 
by authorizing the Landgrave of Hesse to commit 
bigamy. “What no pontiff save Gregory II (726) 
had dared to do, Luther, who attacked the exces- 
sive power of the popes, did without any power 
at all.” * His dispensation was secret, but God 
moves in a mysterious way in the case of reformers. 
Meanwhile, the embarrassments of Charles V, 
who was seriously threatened by the Turks, pre- 
vented him from acting with energy against the 
German Reformation. Finally by the Peace of 
Augsburg (1555), he permitted the Lutheran 
Church to continue in north Germany on the basis 
of a referendum where religion was settled by 
the will of a prince or by the majority of the local 
population. On this basis Bavaria and the Rhine- 
land, south Germany in general, have remained 
Catholic. 

Charles, though himself orthodox, had his own 
reasons for wishing to conciliate the Lutherans. 


* Voltaire. 


LUTHER 179 


Not himself a German, but half Fleming, half 
Spaniard, he ruled by the accidents of inheritance 
and election over the greatest stretch of territory 
since Charlemagne—Spain, Flanders, Spanish 
America, Austria and the Germanies. He revived 
and more than revived the Holy Roman Empire 
of the Middle Ages, before it had reduced itself to 
the Austria of the Hapsburgs. The hegemony of 
Charles was opposed by France, and true to its 
old anti-imperial policy, the Papacy, now under 
Clement VII, nephew to the urbane Leo, allied 
itself with France. The flood of waters predicted 
by Savonarola was now almost ready to engulf 
the Papacy. By its unwillingness to reform and 
its ineptitude in politics it was at odds with all 
the world—the Protestant north and the Catholic 
south. France, in exchange for a measure of self- 
government, ‘‘the liberties of the Gallican Church,” 
was its only friend. Thus Clement VII assisted 
the progress of Protestantism by aligning himself 
against the most powerful Catholic power in Eu- 
rope. Deeply exasperated, the Emperor wrote the 
Lutheran princes in Germany that they would 
soon be wanted against the Turk, adding that 
they would know which Turk he meant. When 
by his victory over the French at Pavia, in 1525, 
the road to Rome was opened, he sent a miscel- 
laneous army of rabid Lutherans, cruel Span- 
iards and mercenary Swiss under a French traitor, 


180 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


the Constable de Bourbon, en route for the eternal 
town. The misty morning of May 5, 1527, ar- 
rived, and the Constable ordered the assault. He 
was killed almost at once, the sculptor Cellini tak- 
ing a pot at him from Sant’ Angelo, but before 
two in the afternoon the city was captured. 
For eight days the sack of Rome continued. 
Cardinals were tortured to disclose their treasures. 
Nuns and noble Roman ladies were outraged in 
the streets. Works of art were rifled or smashed 
by the Lutheran soldiery. The Pope was a pris- 
oner. The spirit of the Renaissance fled forever 
from the desecrated city, and Italy became a 
“geographic expression” under the Spanish yoke 
till 1713, when the Spanish yoke was replaced by 
the Austrian. When after a discreet interval the 
conqueror arrived in 1530 the Pope met him with 
tears and promised never to do it again. This 
new attitude had profound and unexpected effects 
upon the history of Catholicism in England four 
years later. In return Charles allowed the Pope 
to retain the city and the Romagna as states of 
the Church, but that was all. By this time half of 
Germany, Scandinavia, part of Switzerland had 
become Protestant. England and France were 
expected to go next. Among the principal pro- 
moters of the Reformation, Clement VII, last of 
the Renaissance popes, must never be forgotten. 


LUTHER 181 


Meanwhile, a logical Frenchman named Calvin 
had completed what the Apostle of the North had 
begun. His reformation, which was centralized 
at Geneva, in Switzerland, was marked by the 
extreme moral earnestness which we call puritan- 
ism. Calvinism delighted the large number of 
people in the world who love to torment every one 
within reach, including themselves. The fallacy 
that such people are, in any sense, the pioneers of 
religious freedom may be indicated by the fact 
that Calvin burned an amiable gentleman named 
Servetus who had doubts about the precise nature 
of Christ’s divinity. The pontiff of Geneva as- 
serted the predestination of the soul; denied that 
the Deity could enter into bread and wine; and 
proscribed all the liturgical ornaments of religion, 
ceremonies, vestments, music and the like. Luther- 
anism, as a sort of pale shadow of the Catholic 
Church, never extended beyond Germany and the 
Scandinavian states, but the religion of Calvin, 
thanks to that enjoyable capacity for self-torment 
above described, was extremely popular, and 
gained France, Switzerland, Holland, Scotland and 
even England. It is the religion of the Presbyte- 
rian Church in Scotland and America, the Re- 
formed Church of Holland and the Huguenot 
Church in France. Under Cromwell’s rule it be- 
came, for a time, the national religion of England 
as well. 


182 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


By the middle of the sixteenth century Cathol- 
icism seemed to be completely crushed in northern 
Europe, and even in the south it was rapidly losing 
ground. Another generation did not pass before 
the Church not only ceased to lose, but actually 
regained much that it had lost. 


CHAPTER XVII 
ECCLESIA ANGLICANA 


THE Church of England* stood in a peculiar 
relation both to the new movement and to the old 
religion; it is necessary, then, to consider it in a 
separate chapter. At the outset, the English peo- 
ple were not at all inclined to heresy, or even to 
a separation from the Papacy; but the English 
ecclesiastic system was not the Catholic faith; 
and this system, ruined by prosperity, had become, 
in certain respects, intolerable. As a privileged 
caste, the English clergy had rendered themselves 
hateful to the king and the nation by their arro- 
gance, their inertia and their intrigue. As early 
as 1512 Cardinal Wolsey, who was certainly no 
Lutheran, had begun a suppression of the smaller 
monasteries. 

So matters stood when Henry VIII, in 1527, 
applied to the Pope for a dispensation to divorce 
his wife and take another who might be expected 
to bear him male children. Anxiety about the — 
succession was the origin of his action, but this 
was later complicated by the fact that he had 


*In America it is called the Protestant Episcopal Church. 
183 


184 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


fallen in love with a Lutheran maid of honor. 
His motives, however, were fundamentally so ex- 
cellent that there is every chance he would have 
been granted his dispensation had not the reign- 
ing Pope, Clement VII, been a prisoner in the 
hands of the Hapsburg Emperor, who was the 
English Queen’s nephew and champion. He was 
also the champion of the Catholic Church in the 
cruel situation which the Church faced as a result 
of the Protestant revolt in northern Europe, and 
the sack of Rome described in the last chapter. 
Were the Pope to offend his all-powerful jailer, 
who was now his best friend, there was no telling 
what would happen to him or to the Church. 
Accordingly he delayed his decision and delayed 
too long. At the end of five years the Pope still 
retained the Emperor, but England, save for a 
short interval, was forever lost to the Holy See. 

In 1534 Henry cut the knot by the Act of 
Supremacy which declared that the King, not the 
Pope, was henceforward the real head of the 
Church in England. It is sometimes said that in 
doing this Henry founded a new church, that he 
is the father of the Anglican faith in the same 
sense that Luther is the founder of the Lutheran 
one. This statement is obviously ‘untenable. 
What he did was to establish his own authority 
over a national Catholic Church which had hith- 
erto been directed from Rome. The dogma of 


ECCLESIA ANGLICANA 185 


royal supremacy was certainly a very dangerous 
doctrine, and its result has been a certain ambi- 
guity in the position of the English Church from 
Henry VIII on. In 1534 the Church remained 
Catholic because Henry was a Catholic. He sup- 
pressed with equal severity those who differed 
with him over the Supremacy and those who dif- 
fered with the Pope over the Faith. But in suc- 
ceeding reigns the royal supremacy switched the 
Church to the Calvinism of Edward, and finally 
to the semi-Catholicism of Elizabeth. The con- 
science of the nation limped with violent alacrity 
to and fro after that of the sovereign. 

The death of Henry VIII in 1547 revealed the 
worthlessness of his new dogma once it was placed 
in weak or unworthy hands. The new king was a 
priggish boy in his teens, completely under the 
influence of his uncles and of Archbishop Cran- 
mer, who had Protestant sympathies. The history 
of this brief and unpleasant reign is that of a con- 
spiracy on the part of the Protestant faction in 
the saddle to de-Catholicize the Church in Eng- 
land. Two prayer books were issued in succession 
to replace the Catholic missal and breviary; the 
second, which is decidedly Protestant in tone, has 
remained the official service book of the English 
and Episcopal Churches to this day. During this 
reign Catholics were subjected to a petty but 
vexatious persecution. Works of art were muti- 


186 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


lated; the chantries (altars of the dead) were 
“converted into pigsties,” as one of the reformers 
has written with complacency. The famous 
Stephen Gardiner, Catholic Bishop of Winches- 
ter, who is, on the whole, one of the worthier fig- 
ures of this bad reign, reminded his countrymen 
justly that Luther himself reproved such, these 
cochonneries, and that “their authors were if pos- 
sible worse than hogs, and had always been so 
regarded.” 

The people, as a whole, had no sympathy with 
sacrilege and outrage, and on the premature death 
of Edward in 1553 they rallied joyfully to his suc- 
cessor, the Princess Mary. Unfortunately for the 
ultimate triumph of the Faith in England, Mary 
was an intense and morbid Catholic, one of the 
first products of the Counter-Reformation. She 
married her cousin, Philip II of Spain, champion 
of the old faith in Europe, and restored the Papal 
Supremacy. The character of the reigning Pope, 
Julius ITI, indicates how little the Papacy had 
profited by all its recent misfortunes. His first 
official act was to raise to the cardinalate a favor- 
ite page to the delight of the Roman humorists who 
celebrated the simultaneous elevation of the pon- 
tifical Jupiter and the pontifical Ganymede. He 
was an amiable man, however, and bent upon con- 
ciliating the schismatic Church of England. In 
order to please the English he sent them, as his 


ECCLESIA ANGLICANA 187 


legate, a prince of their own blood, an hysterical 
prelate named Reginald Pole who solemnly ab- 
solved the realm from all taint of heresy. After 
this, Mary burned about 300 Protestants, includ- 
ing three heretical bishops and the Primate Cran- 
mer. ‘These cruelties disgusted the nation with 
integral Catholicism. As a matter of fact, the Eng- 
lish were indifferent to the religious issue. What 
they wanted was good government and the end of 
fanaticism, and this is precisely what Mary failed 
to give them. 

Mary was succeeded in 1558 by the Princess 
Elizabeth, last of Henry the Ejighth’s three chil- 
dren. Elizabeth regarded Protestantism and the 
Papal Supremacy with equal dislike. Her political 
position forced her to appear the chief of the Prot- 
estant league of northern Europe, but at heart, as 
she often said, she was as good a Catholic as the 
Holy Father, and she desired the English Church 
to exhibit this double, not to say, hybrid, character. 
It was necessary to steer an exquisitely even 
course; to remodel the Church of England in such 
a way that it should have the name and appearance 
of Protestant, but the organization and hidden 
nature of the old religion. Very well hidden it was 
too. The Papal Supremacy was again quietly 
dropped. Elizabeth retained the Mass, which was 
now called the Communion; a belief in the Real 
Presence without any definition; and the English 


188 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


hierarchy, for which she herself had no respect. 
All the Catholic bishops, with one exception, had 
indignantly resigned, but this exception is held to 
suffice to preserve the Sacrament of “Orders”; 
that is, the mysterious communication of sacerdotal 
powers to the priesthood. The official position of 
the Elizabethan Church was contained in the 
Thirty Nine Articles which are printed at the back 
of every Episcopal prayer book. They have been 
thought so Protestant in tone that modern High 
Churchmen find it convenient either to ignore 
them altogether, or else to explain that they really 
do not mean what they say.* 

This profoundly modified Church, which is, as 
any one can see, the creation of the Crown, received 
the adherence of most Englishmen. Even the 
Catholics adhered till recalled to their obedience 
by a bull of Pius V. From their withdrawal dates 
the existence of Roman Catholicism as a separate 
body in England. When the cause of integral Ca- 
tholicism was identified with that of a rival queen 
(Mary Stuart) Roman Catholics were vigorously 
persecuted by Elizabeth in a series of oppressive — 
statutes called the penal laws. By this time the 
Counter-Reformation was sending its agents, not- 
ably the Jesuits, into England, and these unfortu- 
nate men, whenever they were caught, were barbar- 


* At a recent Convention of the Episcopal Church in this country 
they have been dropped. 


ECCLESIA ANGLICANA 189 


ously tortured as political plotters. Elizabeth 
always contended that she did not punish for dif- 
ferences of opinion, merely for offenses against 
the State, but in 1570 as in 1917, a difference of 
opinion and crime against the State were counted 
one and the same thing. The English Church under 
Elizabeth, whatever may have been its “hidden 
nature,” had all the air of a Protestant body per- 
secuting the most innocent adherents of the old 
religion. In spite of the Queen it remained very 
Protestant, or, as we would say, “Low,” in tone 
until the accession of Charles I. Thus Episco- 
palians have little cause to be proud of ancestors 
who cruelly persecuted Catholic priests for no other 
crime than that of keeping alive a religion which 
they themselves practice, with great satisfaction, in 
ritualist churches. 


CHAPTER XVIII 
LOYOLA 


AFTER having lost half Europe the Papacy re- 
signed itself to convoking the great Council of the 
Church so long desired by moderate reformers like 
Erasmus. The Council met at Trent on the con- 
fines between Italy and the Empire in 1545, but 
its deliberations, several times interrupted, were 
not finished until 1563. It codified the Catholic 
faith; asserted the Papal Supremacy; affirmed the 
dogma of free will; and provided for a thorough 
house cleaning of clerical abuses. It is the first act 
in the somber drama of the Counter Reformation, 
the results and spirit of which we are still feeling. 
Reinach has been the only one to point out that 
this reactionary movement was, in a sense, a Prot- 
estant, not to say puritan, infusion in the veins 
of the old religion. The obscurantism, the dry and 
negative spirit, and the exaggerated purity of mod- 
ern Catholicism in certain quarters, may be 
attributed to this movement which would have 
astonished Saint Francis and which contradicts the 
admirable Italian Catholicism of the thirteenth 


century. 
190 


LOYOLA 191 


In the course of a single generation the whole 
spirit of the Church underwent a profound change. 
The popes themselves became good men. The 
first of these severe but exemplary pontiffs, Mar- 
cellus IT, regulated the liturgical beauty of Catholic 
worship and music; it was he who commissioned 
Palestrina to compose the glorious Mass of Pope 
Marcellus which represents the apogee of church 
music In the contrapuntal style. His successor, 
Pius V, walked barefoot at the head of processions, 
and impressed the world by innumerable examples 
of charity, humility and forgiveness of personal 
injuries. A religious chivalry, consecrated to the 
battle of the Church against the Protestant north, 
actuated these popes, and extended throughout 
their whole following down to their courtiers and 
men of art. Tasso, the poet of the reaction, con- 
centrated his epic about the heroic and touching 
figure of Godfrey de Bouillon, the paladin of the 
holy wars. 

Among those present at the Council of Trent had 
been a disabled Spanish soldier of good family, 
Ignatius Loyola. He was almost totally unedu- 
cated, except in the fantastic romances of low- 
Medieval chivalry, parodied by Cervantes in Don 
Ouixote. His existence had been one gorgeous 
day-dream of rescued queens and infidels subdued. 
After his disablement a new vision came to mingle 
with these fantasies. The Queen of Heaven ap- 


192 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


peared to him in dreams and bade him battle for 
her lost kingdoms, prostrate under the maleficent 
charms of false prophets. The romantic and 
baroque Catholicism of later times makes its first 
appearance in this ardent, disordered, but very 
human spirit. He associated others with him in 
these dreams and fevers. When asked to what 
order or society they belonged they replied invari- 
ably: “‘To the Society of Jesus.” 

“With what vehemence, with what policy, with 
what exact discipline, with what dauntless cour- 
age, with what self-denial, with what forgetfulness 
of the dearest private ties, with what intense and 
stubborn devotion to a single end, and with what 
unscrupulous laxity and versatility in the choice 
of means, the Jesuits fought the battle of the 
Church, is written in every page of the annals of 
Europe during several generations. In the Order 
of Jesus was concentrated the quintessence of the 
Catholic spirit; and the history of the Order of 
Jesus is the history of the great Catholic reaction 
. . . Dominant in the south of Europe, the great 
Order soon went forth conquering and to conquer. 
In spite of oceans and deserts, of hunger and pesti- 
lence, of spies and penal laws, of dungeons and 
racks, of gibbets and quartering-blocks, Jesuits 
were to be found under every disguise and in every 
country; in the hostile court of Sweden, in the old 
manor-houses of Cheshire, among the hovels of 


LOYOLA 193 


Connaught, arguing, instructing, consoling, steal- 
ing away the hearts of the young, animating the 
courage of the timid, holding up the crucifix be- 
fore the eyes of the dying. Nor was it less their 
office to plot against the thrones and safety of 
apostate kings, to spread evil rumors, to raise 
tumults, to inflame civil wars, to arm the hand of 
the assassin. Inflexible in nothing but in their 
fidelity to the Church, they were equally ready to 
appeal in her cause to the spirit of loyalty and to 
the spirit of freedom. Extreme doctrines of obe- 
dience and extreme doctrines of liberty, the right 
of rulers to misgovern the people, the right of 
every one of the people to plunge his knife in the 
heart of a bad ruler, were inculcated by the same 
man, according as he addressed himself to the 
subject of Philip or to the subject of Elizabeth. 
Some described these divines as the most rigid, 
others as the most indulgent, of spiritual directors; 
and both these descriptions were correct. The truly 
devout listened with awe to the high and saintly 
morality of the Jesuit. The gay cavalier who had 
run his rival through the body, the frail beauty 
who had forgotten her marriage vow, found in the 
Jesuit an easy, well-bred man of the world, who 
knew how to make allowances for the little irregu- 
larities of people of fashion. The first object was 
to drive no person out of the pale of the Church. 
Since there were bad people, it was better that there 


194 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


should be bad Catholics than bad Protestants. If 
a person was so unfortunate as to be a bravo, a 
libertine or a gambler, that was no reason for mak- 
ing him a heretic too.” 

There is no more splendid tribute than this pow- 
erful passage of a Protestant historian, Macaulay, 
on the Jesuits. Others have not been so kind to 
them. Michelet could see nothing but evil in the 
Order, and absurdly overrated its abilities by 
associating with them the most sinister and unlikely 
enterprises, like the murder of Henry IV, its pro- 
tector. Voltaire, the greatest individual antag- 
onist who has ever attacked the Church, spoke 
always very kindly of the fathers who had given 
him his education. A Catholic Society which can 
win the approbation of a Voltaire can win any- 
thing. 

Armed with this invaluable reinforcement, the 
Papacy prepared to do battle with the Protestants 
for the still debatable territory, the no man’s land 
of France, Belgium, south Germany, Poland, Hun- 
gary and England. The contest between the two 
powers was only finally decided by the Treaty of 
Westphalia (1648) which terminated the Thirty 
Years’ War and gave Europe, for a time, universal 
peace. The struggle was most typical and intense 
in England and France and will be described in the 
next chapters. The great strength of Catholicism 
was in its unity, in that element of internationalism 


LOYOLA 195 


which was, and is, its principal service to society. 
The great weakness of the Protestant churches was 
that they were nationalist bodies. Even the Church 
of England had become an institution as purely 
local as the county sheriff. The Catholic Church, 
on the other hand, claimed to be battling for a 
truth which, in the hands of missionaries like Saint 
Francis Xavier and Pere Marquette, embraced 
every one from the pope at Rome to the most re- 
mote heathen in Japan or the most savage redskin 
in Canada. This capital difference in the two 
creeds accounts for the comparative triumph of 
Catholicism at the close of the memorable and 
bloody sixteenth century. Driven at the beginning 
of the century beyond the Alps and the Pyrenees, it 
had, at the end, driven the Protestant heresy to the 
shores of the German ocean; and in the coloniza- 
tion of the two Americas it looked beyond the seas 
and found new worlds to conquer. 

I do not wish to leave this period without a word 
for the type of art which is its direct product. The 
Baroque style, together with the churches, the 
painting and sculpture where it is displayed, has 
fallen into general disfavor. The contempt ex- 
pressed for it by Ruskin and the followers of ‘‘the 
Gothic Quest” has been passed on to the snobs 
who never see anything with their own eyes, and 
to the tourists who never see anything except with 
those of Baedeker. To counteract this unreflect- 


196 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


ing contempt, it is only necessary to remind oneself 
that the real founder of the despised style is 
Michelangelo. There is considerable Baroque feel- 
ing in his Sistine frescoes, as there is in the “As- 
sumption” of Titian, and, generally, in the paint- 
ings of the charming Correggio, while “‘the work of 
that ‘mighty rushing wind,’ Tintoretto,” to quote 
Mr. Raymond Mortimer,* “already displays that 
mixture of poetry and realism, of tenderness and 
violence, of emotion and decorativeness which char- 
acterized Baroque art.” It gave us in its later 
phase as good a painter as Domenichino and as 
good a sculptor as Bernini. Whether one likes it 
or not, it is the characteristic style of the Counter 
Reform, and not the least of its merits is that its 
palaces and gardens, its churches and fountains, are 
everywhere in modern Rome, and constitute much 
of the charm of that fascinating city. 
*In the Dial, December, 1920. 


CHAPTER XIX 
THE LAST CRUSADE 


QUEEN ELizABETH of England (1558-1603) is 
anenigma. A child of the English Renaissance and 
the feminine incarnation of a narrow nationalism, 
a freethinker and the organizer of a persecuting 
church, a bluestocking and a flirt, a lover of men 
and withal a virgin, a despot who was adored, she 
fitly sums up an age of tortuous cross-purposes. 
In none of her relationships, however, is the mys- 
tery of iniquity more obscure than in the treat- 
ment of her unfortunate Catholic subjects. 

Henry VIII, Elizabeth’s father, had, as we have 
seen, separated the Church in England from Rome, 
but he had made no changes in religion. He initi- 
ated a schism, if one wills, but the schism was so 
little a part of the Protestant movement on the 
Continent that Henry burned all the English Prot- 
estants on whom he could lay hand. Under his 
son Edward the tentative of a Protestant State 
Church was begun. The Episcopal Prayer Book, 
then devised, contains, indeed, a modification of 


the old faith, but a faith modified is not, necessar- 
197 


198 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


ily, a faith transformed. ‘The Prayer Book con- 
tains omissions,” wrote the Catholic Bishop Quadra 
to Pius IV, “but no positive heresies.””’ Edward’s 
sister, Mary, headed an instant return to the Holy 
See. When Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1558 
England was officially a Catholic country in com- 
munion with Rome. Philip II, the most Catholic 
King of Spain, was Elizabeth’s brother-in-law. 
The change which made the official English 
religion an outlawed cult was exquisitely gradual. 
The reason for the second break with Rome and 
the final establishment of the Episcopal Church of 
England, delicately maneuvered by Elizabeth, must 
be ascribed in part to motives of feminine vanity. 
There was much in the Catholic religion she dis- 
liked as well as much she admired. Notably she 
hated the theoretic subordination of Catholic 
states to the Papacy. This clashed with her con- 
ception of what the absolute State, the new Eng- 
land, should and must be. Like Constantine she 
intended to have but one religion in England, and 
it was to be her own invention. It was pleasing 
to her a freethinker and a woman to throw out 
the pope and retain the hierarchy, to abolish the 
Mass and keep the Communion, to observe Fridays 
and Lent because it encouraged the fishing, to ban- 
ish images from her churches and set them up in 
her chapel, to uphold bishops and insult their 
wives. The result of these various caprices and 


THE LAST CRUSADE 199 


compromises is the mixed Episcopalianism that we 
know to-day. 

The Roman Catholic population was left abso- 
lutely to its own devices during this experimental 
period from 1559 to 1570. When in 1562 they 
asked whether they might attend the Anglican 
services, Pius IV replied in the words of Christ 
that “he who is ashamed of Me, of him the Son 
of Man shall be ashamed,” but he sent them no 
priests of their own faith to sustain them. They 
were cut off both from their Anglican fellow coun- 
trymen and their own universal Church throughout 
the world. Naturally they declined numerically. 
Neither Pius IV nor the Council of Trent, which 
ended in 1563, nor the Catholic Emperor nor their 
friend, the King of Spain, did anything for them. 
English Catholicism was quietly but firmly en 
couraged to die. 

That it did not die is due to a tactical blunder, 
followed by a noble and heroic missionary tenta- 
tive. In 1570 the new Pope, Saint Pius V, calmly 
and unexpectedly excommunicated Elizabeth and 
released her Catholic subjects from their obedience. 
The Borgia in the preceding century had made 
religion the handmaid of politics. ‘Fra Scarpone”’ 
reversed the process. It was only to be expected 
that a man of his temper should effect a complete 
cleavage between the English Roman Catholics and 
the followers of Elizabeth’s church, but the bull of 


200 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


excommunication reacted disastrously upon the 
former. Nothing in fact could have been more ill- 
timed. Two years before, the Catholic heiress to 
the English crown had arrived, a fugitive, in Eng- 
land. Elizabeth promptly imprisoned her, but even 
in imprisonment Mary Stuart was the center of 
temptation for any romantic Roman Catholic who 
might imagine, not unnaturally, that he and his 
Church would be happier under the lovely Queen 
of Scots than under the Anglican lioness. The wish 
is father to the act. From 1568 on there was a 
series of plots on the part of individual Catholics 
to dethrone Elizabeth and put the queen of hearts 
in her place. Naturally they roused feeling, and 
the Pope’s bull arriving at this unfortunate mo- 
ment roused more feeling. The result was 
a set of penal statutes passed in Parliament 
making the exercise of the Catholic religion 
itself an offense against Elizabeth’s State. It 
was a crime to say Mass; a slightly lesser crime 
to hear it. It was a crime, punishable by death, to 
convert a Protestant to the old religion. It was a 
crime for a Catholic to travel five miles away from 
his home. The English government pled, in excuse 
for its intolerance, that it was protecting itself 
against the triple danger of a disaffected Catholic 
minority, spurred to treason by the Pope’s bull, 
and finding its natural objective in the imprisoned 
Mary. This is true, but the persecution fell chiefly 


THE LAST CRUSADE 201 


upon any number of loyal and innocent Roman 
Catholics whose only crime was their religion. At 
the same time it produced the first and Homeric 
age in the history of Roman Catholicism in Eng- 
land, considered as a separate Church. Ten years 
after the Pope’s bull the first missionaries arrived 
in what was to them a forbidden country. The 
true heroes of the Church from 1580 to 1588 were 
not the Pope Sixtus V, anathematizing from 
the security of the Vatican, nor a handful of 
intriguants; they were the innocent priests who 
from 1580 on poured into England from the Eng- 
lish colleges on the Continent, the Jesuit pupils 
and seminary students, the “flowers of mar- 
tyrdom.”’ 

Protestant historians, like Bishop Creighton and 
Froude, try to lave the memory of the Virgin 
Queen from the indelible stain of what follows by 
asserting in Elizabeth’s words that she did not 
persecute for religious reasons but only for treason, 
that these missionaries and Jesuits were dangerous 
plotters, agents for the Pope, Spain and Mary 
Stuart, preparers of the Armada. This miserable 
sophistry is easy to expose. Some were undoubt- 
edly plotters, but the government’s crime was that, 
like the Ceesars, it identified religion with politics, 
and every avowed priest was considered ipso facto 
a political prisoner and treated accordingly. That 


202 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


the majority was innocent of political agitation we 
know from the published instructions given to 
Jesuit missionaries by their General Aquiviva. 
“They must not mix themselves up with affairs 
of state, nor write to Rome about political matters, 
nor speak, nor allow others to speak, in their pres- 
ence, against the Queen.” ‘Their only charge, as 
the Jesuit Campion said before his judges, ‘‘Was 
to preach the Gospel, to minister the Sacraments, 
to instruct the simple, to reform sinners, to confute 
errors, and in brief, to cry alarm spiritual against 
the proud ignorance wherewith my dear country- 
men are abused.” 

The whole English mission was animated by this 
spirit, rivaling that of the primitive Christian mar- 
tyrs under Nero and Diocletian. Among the better 
achievements of the Catholic reaction there is 
nothing grander than the lives of these missionaries, 
many of them mere boys. When a Frenchman or 
Spaniard or Italian took orders in the sixteenth 
century Church he might, nine times out of ten, 
be influenced by the dream of a career. No such 
career lay before these doomed Englishmen. Their 
guerdon was not the mitre, the crozier nor the red 
hat; it was the cell, the horrible rack, the tumbril 
surrounded by jeering crowds, the blackness of 
pain and death. On their walks through Rome 
during recreation boys from the English College 


THE LAST CRUSADE 203 


were saluted by the gentle Saint Philip Neri with 
the words: Salvete flores martyrum! 

Something worse than death, indeed, awaited 
them in their own land, that merry and tender 
Elizabethan England, the country of the sweet 
Shakespeare and the chivalrous Ferie Queen. 
When one of them was caught he was sent up to 
London, and in the presence of the horrible tor- 
turer, Mr. Topcliffe, was asked the following ques- 
tions: Did he acknowledge Elizabeth as his lawful 
queen? Did he believe that the Pope could ex- 
communicate and depose the Queen? In the event 
of a Catholic invasion which side would he take, 
the Queen’s or the Pope’s? 

The first question the priest usually answered 
in the affirmative; the second evasively on the 
ground that it was a question for Church Coun- 
cils to decide; to a third a good Catholic could only 
answer: If the invasion were for no other cause 
than to restore the Catholic religion, I would side 
with the invader—a reply which would certainly 
send him to the gallows. If he did not answer the 
first two questions in a manner satisfactory to the 
judges, he was racked till he spoke out; if he 
answered the third as a Catholic he was killed; in 
either case he usually died. In his revolting apol- 
ogy for torture Lord Burleigh objected that only 
persons were racked whose guilt was patent, but 
guilt in the sense of the penal laws included the 


204 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


mere fact of being a priest. Among those tortured 
was a boy, Thomas Sherwood (1578) thirteen years 
old. The victims themselves ascribed’ their suffer- 
ings to Protestant fanaticism, plain heresy. “TI 
blame not so much,” said one, “‘the men who have 
prepared these things . . . as the heresy which 
incited men, not naturally cruel, to such hardness 
of heart against their fellows that they are re- 
strained from treating them in the cruelest fashion 
neither by their common nationality, nor educa- 
tion, nor by their youth, their right to freedom, 
nor the immunity of their priesthood, nor prayers, 
nor tears.” It is only fair to add that the Protes- 
tant victims of Philip the Second’s Inquisition in 
Spain and the Netherlands could have employed 
much the same language. In England pardon was 
sometimes offered if the accused would change his 
religion. “I thank you heartily,” said one tortured 
man, “if by going to church I can save my life, all 
the world will see that I am executed solely for 
faith and religion, and nothing else.” At length 
the more intelligent in the government began to 
see that a code which furnished such martyrs to 
the Catholic faith was reacting seriously against 
their own nation and church. They did not stop 
the persecution, but on the scaffold they merely 
stopped the victims’ mouths. 

The national sense of fair play was at its lowest 


THE LAST CRUSADE 205 


ebb at the very moment when the national genius 
rose to its supreme height in Marlowe and Shake- 
speare. And the reason is not so much religious 
intolerance in which, of course, most of the Catho- 
lics shared, as it was that the first Anglicans made 
of the absolute State itself a religion which would 
brook no rival near the throne, even when that 
rival came with clean hands and holy purpose. 
One hundred per cent American Catholics would do 
well to ponder the history of their Church under 
Queen Elizabeth. 

All injustice, as Carlyle said, is but natural 
anarchy, and comes to end, at all events, relaxes. 
In England the persecution of the Church attained 
its climax when Elizabeth at last sent her prisoner, 
Mary Stuart, to the block, and Mary Stuart, the 
night before her death, willed her English inheri- 
tence, the Crown, to the King of Spain. Philip II, 
though universally regarded as the pillar of the 
Counter Reform, had held off all these years, 
while his co-religionists were being hunted in Eng- 
land like dogs, from any show of interference. His 
timidity and delay had worn out even the Pope. 
Now that his greed was aroused by Mary Stuart’s 
legacy he made immediate preparations to invade 
England, dethrone Elizabeth and restore the 
Catholic faith by arms. The whole European 
world, Catholic and Protestant, awaited the result 


206 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


breathlessly, understanding that the two reforma- 
tions, Protestant and Catholic, were being pitted 
against each other. Rightly or wrongly England 
was regarded as the cornerstone of the Protestant 
revolt. However much Elizabeth and her Angli- 
cans might sniff at the uncouth religious views of 
Scotch Presbyterians and Dutch Reformers, Eng- 
land supplied the very backbone of their resistance, 
and nowhere had the Catholic reaction been more 
savagely resisted than by Elizabeth and her gov- 
ernment. If Philip won, the French Huguenots 
and Dutch rebels would lose their chief support; 
Lutheran Germany would return to the Church, 
and the divisions of Christendom would cease. Or 
so it was supposed. At Easter, 1588, Philip IT 
spent three hours a day in prayer before the Holy 
Sacrament, commending to God the result of his 
enterprise. His standard on the Armada bore the 
words: Rise, O God, and judge Thy Cause. 

We know the rest; how the huge sea-castles of 
Don Philip set sail off Corunna, and nosed their 
way northward till they confronted the stocky Eng- 
lish fleet in the Channel. We know, too, how the 
English Roman Catholics behaved when faced with 
this ultimate challenge to their patriotism. Their 
patriotism had been the issue all along, or so said 
Elizabeth’s government, and now in July, 1588, 
they gave the ultimate lie to their accusers. So 
long as the Catholic heir had been a woman, perse- 


THE LAST CRUSADE 207 


cuted and partly English, there had been found 
more than one Catholic to plot for her at the cost 
of what then was technically called treason. But 
when Mary Stuart was replaced by her unpleasing 
legatee they rallied around the tyrannical throne as 
one man, and it was a Catholic, Lord Howard of 
Effingham, who commanded the fleet which put to 
flight the Spanish Armada. Fines, imprisonments, 
the torture and murder of their priests, the 
attempted suppression of their religion did not 
deter them when it came to choosing between their 
female Diocletian and the Spaniard. When the 
enemy lost heart, cut cable and drifted hopelessly 
into the Atlantic, Catholic and Protestant gave 
thanks that while the Counter Reform at its best 
had not conquered England, the Counter Reform 
of Philip and the Spanish Inquisition, that is to 
say, the reaction at its worst, had been put to 
confusion. 

Even the Pope, Sixtus V, appreciated this dis- 
tinction better than many modern historians. 
Philip begged him again and again to invest him 
formally with the English Crown in the event of 
victory, but the Pope always put him off, reserv- 
ing the right to back a better candidate, the King 
of Scots, for instance, who eventually did succeed 
Elizabeth in 1603. In this attitude the Pope stood 
with the future. That the Armada, considered as 
a Spanish enterprise, failed might be a matter for 


208 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


complacency; that it failed as a Catholic one, the 
ultimate expression of the last of the Crusades, can 
only be praised on the typically Anglo-Saxon 
assumption that everything which happens in his- 
tory is right because it happens, 


CHAPTER XX 
THE WHITE PLUME 


Ir was in France that the spirit of the Catholic 
reaction appeared at its worst. This is probably 
due to the fact that the French, often light and 
volatile on the surface, are constitutionally incap- 
able of treating any abstract question in a spirit of 
moderation. The national fanaticism, especially 
in religion, is revealed in all its bad luster through 
four centuries from the Bartholomew to the prose- 
cution of Dreyfus. France produced Calvin, the 
most radical of the reformers, and the spirit be- 
queathed by him to the Huguenot sect, though ad- 
mirable in its fortitude, was also a spirit which 
demanded all or nothing. On the Catholic side, 
the French Church and court, morally at their 
nadir, were none the less fanatical to the last 
extreme. They were both very Italianized during 
the reigns of the last Valois, especially the court, 
whose presiding genius, the Queen-Mother, Cath- 
erine de Medici, was Florentine and a worthy 
product of that noble commune. Into the Catholic 
cause was injected the animus of the vendetta, the 


private duel to the death. The court thought that 
209 


210 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


religion could be saved by the methods, at once 
trifling and dastardly, of condottieri and neighbor- 
hood wars, and this spirit is the whole history of 
the Catholic reaction in France from the Bar- 
tholomew to the assassination of Henry IV. 

The latter was at once the central and the salu- 
tary genius in the drama of the religious wars. By 
origin, the first of the Bourbons was a little Béar- 
naise princelet, educated with the education of 
Gargantua, said to have been a portrait of his 
father; running barefoot with the peasant boys in 
the pastures of his small Protestant kingdom on the 
slopes of the Pyrenees. He was the true type of 
Gascon adventurer after Dumas, gay, shrewd, 
good-natured, always in love. Volatile and often 
false, he had nevertheless a great charm of exter- 
nal goodness which made people love him. The 
French who fought him thirty years, and accepted 
him only to kill him later, have always regretted 
him as “the best of kings.” 

He had need to be good or, at any rate, prudent, 
for he confronted frightful odds. Two persons 
stood between him and the French throne; the 
king, Charles IX, and his brother, the Duke of 
Anjou, both of whom seemed likely to die with- 
out children. But after them the whole Catholic 
reaction, that is to say, the French nation, inter- 
vened between him and his inheritance. He was 
a Huguenot, and most of the nation stood ready to 


THE WHITE PLUME 211 


disavow their birthright, to become Spanish, rather 
than submit to a Protestant king. They were 
Catholics first and Frenchmen second, or rather 
not at all, and in this they were just the opposite 
of their English co-religionists. Everything worked 
to the advantage of Spain, of Philip II. The latter 
was the recognized champion of Catholic ortho- 
doxy, had his agents everywhere, and especially in 
France, where the clergy, the monastic orders, and 
the very court, ignobly vicious and ignobly poor, 
were in his pay. His principal tools were the 
Guises, a powerful feudal family of German extrac- 
tion who occasionally posed as independent and 
nationalist, but who could not make a move with- 
out leaning on the King of Spain. Through their 
charming niece, Mary Stuart, they had hoped to 
control Calvinist Scotland, but the Queen of Scots 
sacrificed Catholicism and kingdom to the Queen 
of Love, and perished, as we have seen, in an Eng- 
lish prison. Having lost Scotland, the Guises, at a 
very early date, conceived the idea of becoming 
kings of France. 

The Treaty of St. Germain (1570) had ended 
the first civil war between Catholics and Protes- 
tants. To cement the peace it was decided to marry 
the last of the Valois, the Princess Marguerite, to 
the Protestant heir, Henry of Navarre, and all the 
Huguenots in France were invited to the wedding. 
The bridegroom, his cousin the Prince de Condé, 


212 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


the venerable Admiral de Coligny, best of the 
French Protestants, and numerous other gentle- 
men, the fine flower of the Huguenot party, were 
quartered together at Paris. At this moment the 
young king, Charles IX, seemed really to turn 
toward the holy cause of harmony and toleration, 
the true French party. He broke with Philip II, 
listened ardently to the admiral’s patriotic pro- 
posal of a defensive policy against Spain and the 
England of Elizabeth, embraced the old man, call- 
ing him “my father.” It is impossible to believe 
that Charles IX was insincere at this moment. He 
was infinitely the best of his bad family, but he 
was easily impressionable and a little mad. In the 
meantime, Catherine de Medici and the Duke of 
Anjou, the guilty mother and the guilty brother, 
regarded the king’s attitude with consternation. 
He was already free of Spain, and the next moment 
it seemed likely that he would escape altogether 
from his family, and might even turn on them. It 
was certainly necessary to get rid of the admiral. 
A brave was hired, who fired on the admiral while 
the latter was passing from the Louvre to his lodg- 
ings, wounding him in the arm. Charles IX was 
furious at the attempt upon the life of the old man. 
He swore with many terrible oaths that he would 
requite it upon the conspirators “whoever they 
might be.” The mother and brother were now in 
a high state of nerves. It was more than ever nec- 


THE WHITE PLUME 213 


essary to get rid of the admiral . . . and then, 
like a flash of lightning, they conceived the idea of 
destroying the whole Protestant faction, so con- 
veniently concentrated at that moment in Paris. 
Why not? They would thus solve the religious 
problem by annihilating at one stroke a whole 
party; in so doing they would disembarrass them- 
selves of several personal enemies in the classic 
Italian style, and at the same time strike a valiant 
blow for the Catholic cause to the satisfaction of 
the Pope and that of the lay pope, their paymaster, 
the King of Spain. 

It was a startling enterprise, all the more wicked 
perhaps because it was planned on the spur of a 
cowardly moment by a cabal of political criminals 
without even the bad excuse of religious passion in 
their favor. Only it was very difficult to gain over 
the King. They argued with him until ten in the 
evening (August 23), and the massacre was slated 
to begin before daylight. Fear, however, is con- 
tagious, and Charles IX was gradually converted 
to the base terror of his relatives, who represented 
that he stood in actual danger from the Huguenots. 
“Let them all die,” he said finally, ‘‘that not one 
be left to reproach me.” 

About an hour before dawn a pistol was dis- 
charged from the Louvre, and the tocsin of the 
royal parish, St. Germain d’Auxerrois, began to 
ring. It was the signal for a slaughter which en- 


214 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


dured for days. This event has loomed blackly in 
the imagination of some historians who like to 
represent it as a product of the Catholic reaction, 
a purely religious atrocity. This is only true to the 
extent that the actual work of massacre was exe- 
cuted by the devout bourgeois of Paris who de- 
tested the Huguenots, partly on religious, partly on 
commercial, grounds. In its origin, however, the 
Bartholomew was a political crime. Its true au- 
thors were the Queen-Mother and the Duke of 
Anjou, the future Henry III. The young King of 
Navarre saved himself by abjuring the Protestant 
faith. In the ghastly dawn, he and his cousin, the 
Prince de Condé, were brought before Charles IX, 
then in a state of insane collapse, and ordered to 
become Catholics or instantly perish. In view of 
the circumstances they abjured with alacrity. 
Shortly after, Henry of Navarre escaped to the 
south, where he placed himself at the head of his 
Huguenot forces. His second apostasy did not 
trouble him once he was safe out of Paris. Charles 
TX died, prematurely, worn out by all the horrors 
he had witnessed and permitted. His brother, co- 
author of the Bartholomew, became the last Valois 
king of France. 

Henry III was the most intelligent, as he was 
the most depraved, of the Valois. On neither count 
did he please his Catholic subjects. He was too 
astute to pursue the religious war to the ultimate 


THE WHITE PLUME 215 


profit of the Guises, while his private life was in 
shocking contradiction to the austere spirit of the 
Counter Reform. It was a succession of fantastic 
debaucheries varied by baroque devotions like the 
famous processions of the flagellants, in which ten- 
der youths and maids of honor, half undressed, 
flogged each other with a certain sensuality in the 
old streets of Gothic Paris. The king himself was 
so prematurely used up by these and other ambigu- 
ous excesses that after three moments of love he 
took three days of repose. The great Catholic 
hero of France was the Duke of Guise. He was 
adored by the populace as much as the king was 
detested. -Under these circumstances there was 
formed at Paris the celebrated bourgeois confed- 
eration known as the Holy League to defend the 
kingdom against the Huguenot, and particularly 
against the Huguenot heir. It was composed of 
mendicants, ruined shopkeepers, cappucini, all the 
vermin of the convents and the schools. The nat- 
ural captain of this organization would have been 
the Duke of Guise, and in his ambitious hands such 
a body, formed ostensibly to resist the Protestant 
heir, could be turned profitably against the unpopu- 
lar king. Henry III, with a flash of his old astute- 
ness, checked this move momentarily by dominat- 
ing himself captain of the League, but the citizens 
saw through his game and rebelled outright. He 
fled to Blois, where he was joined by the Duke of 


216 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Guise, who thus walked straight into the lion’s 
mouth, but did so with nonchalance, thinking that 
the King lacked the spirit to harm him. He mis- 
calculated, however, for the King, beside himself 
with impotence and hatred, had the Duke assas- 
sinated by the swords of his forty-five guardsmen 
in his bed chamber at Blois. 

When the League learned of the murder of its 
Christian hero, its agitation knew no limits and no 
decency. From that moment Henry III ceased to 
be King of France. The pulpits were filled with 
furious preachers who thundered against the King’s 
special predilections in the literal language of 
Sodom, when it was not that of the gutter. They 
implored heaven to furnish an assassin who would 
rid the Catholic kingdom of a Catholic king, the 
last of his race. Every day some one deserted him 
for the League. In his desperation between the 
Protestant devil in the south and the raging sea of 
Paris, Henry III commended the Catholic reaction 
to Satan, turned frankly toward the devil, and 
made an alliance withthe King of Navarre. 

The two Kings met at Plessis, near Tours. 
Henry of Navarre in his frayed brown pourpoint, 
the famous white panache in his hat, advanced to 
meet the King of France and threw himself on 
his knees. A crowd so great that even the trees 
were charged with spectators surrounded them. 
Every one embraced, Catholics and Huguenots, 


THE WHITE PLUME 217 


without distinction of faith or faction. After two 
generations of futile hatred it was a fine moment 
and one that struck the death-knell of fanaticism. 

At Paris the League continued to breathe fire 
and flames. It had thrown off all appearance of 
nationalism and declared openly for the Spaniard. 
In the convents they said that only a miracle could 
save them. Three young men, or rather boys in 
their teens, swore to reénact the rodle of Judith and 
kill Henry III in his tent, or in-his bed. ‘These 
suggestions acted strongly on the feeble brain of 
a young Dominican named Jacques Clement. He 
bought a long knife, procured letters to Henry 
III at Saint Cloud, where the King was now be- 
sieging Paris, and while his victim was reading 
them, stabbed him. The last of the Valois died in 
the arms of the King of Navarre, recommending | 
to the latter his throne. 

Never was there a stranger accession. Half 
the Catholic noblesse who had hitherto remained 
loyal to Henry III, on being confronted with the 
heretic successor, threw their hats on the ground 
crying: “Plutot mourir!” Moreover, there re- 
mained Paris, now garrisoned by a Spanish con- 
tingent, and ready to blow itself up with gun- 
powder as in the good days of the Commune rather 
than yield. The only way that Henry could take 
the wind out of this monstrous bigotry was, as 
he himself expressed it, “to make the perilous 


218 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


leap.” He added, in his characteristic vein, that 
“Paris was worth a Mass.” In July, 1593, he 
wrote to his Catholic mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, 
that he was going to be received into the Church. 

A little later, and without disorder, he made his 
entry into Paris. The people so long bullied by 
violent imbeciles received him as if he had been 
the Sun of Justice. ‘There remained, to be sure, 
another king, namely, the papal legate, who, hav- 
ing no orders, refused to recognize him. The 
popes of the period, whatever might have been 
their personal predilections for France or the cause 
of peace, were in the position of chaplains to Philip 
II, and the spite of the latter at losing another 
kingdom through the well-timed conversion of 
Henry may be imagined. It was impossible, none 
the less, for Clement VIII to delay his recognition 
of the French King forever, and finally, in 1595, 
the French ambassador was allowed to kneel be- 
fore the Pope and curia in the Piazza of Saint 
Peter’s and receive in his master’s name the 
pontifical absolution. “The Papal See,” says 
Ranke, “once more appeared, on this occasion, in 
all the splendor of its ancient authority.” 

This is the end of the religious wars in France. 
We have dwelt at length on Henry IV because he 
stood triumphantly between two bad extremes, be- 
cause, like his contemporary Montaigne, he per- 
sonified a new and gay type of indifference to the 


THE WHITE PLUME 219 


religious issues employed and abused ad nauseam 
by the Reform and the Counter Reform in France. 
That famous white plume, which he carried tri- 
umphantly through two apostasies, is counted by 
some the white feather of moral defeat; to me it 
is the symbol of a new hope in a world distracted 
by the vile intolerance of the sixteenth century. 
He could not kill the monster by conquest. Mit 
der Dumhett streichen vergebens die Gotter. But 
he killed it by skepticism, by kindness, by a flash 
of the best secular and Voltairian spirit appearing 
two centuries before its time; and in doing so he 
killed himself. It is said that during his entry a 
man, standing in a window, regarded him fixedly 
and refused to salute him. The King merely 
laughed and passed on. The Counter Reform 
never forgave him that laugh which symbolized 
his real greatness. He was determined to protect 
his old co-religionists, to keep clean of Spain, to 
launch three armies in saving Europe from the 
Hapsburg monarchy, the monarchy of the In- 
quisition and the auto-da-fe, and all this with a 
bounty, a sovereign charm, with a laugh. What 
could the Counter Reform do with such a man but 
kill him? 

He brought France safely out of the religious 
hell of the sixteenth century, but by the blind 
knife of Ravaillac, the blind spirit of the time took 
its posthumous revenge. And now, thank God, 


220 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


we are done with the sixteenth century, with its 
two reformations, Protestant and Catholic, with 
Luther and Loyola. It is the century of martyrs 
and fanatics, hateful to us on either count because 
the two are usually one and the same. That soli- 
tary child of this world, Henry IV, was wiser in 
his generation than all the children of light, 


CHAPTER XXI 


GRANDEUR AND DECLINE OF THE 
GALLICAN CHURCH 


Ir seems that we will never be done with the 
Church in France. The latter is as much in the 
foreground during the seventeenth as it has been 
during the sixteenth century. This comes from 
the fact that nothing relating to France is unim- 
portant during the sixteen hundreds. Paris, later 
Versailles, were truly the centers of the universe. 
The dazzling reign of the Sun-King, Louis XIV 
(1643-1715), merely completed and gilded the 
commanding influence inaugurated by the Beéar- 
nais, and continued by a prince of the Catholic 
Church, the Cardinal de Richelieu. 

A Jansenist painter, Philippe de Champagne, 
has given us a fine portrait of “the sphinx in the 
red robe” which is also, in a way, a portrait of the 
French Church in the seventeenth century. Save 
for the cardinalitial scarlet, everything seems gray 
in this picture. Gray eyes, gray background, fine 
pallid hands like those of one already dead. Gray 


is the quintessential color of this Church, a Church 
221 


222 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


in which there is the utmost pomp and absolutely 
no life, a corpse wrapped in gorgeous cerements 
and sustaining the illusion of vitality even in cold 
death. Its very austerity, that of the Jansenists, 
is a kind of rigor mortis. Its very pomp is petrified, 
speaking in a religious sense. It is notable that 
at this period they destroyed in a great quantity 
the colorful and charitable churches of the Gothic 
age, and substituted ugly conventicles in the new 
classic style, lacking even the strained vitality of 
the true baroque; churches resembling bourses 
and banks. At the same time they smashed the 
too human glories of medieval stained windows, 
replacing them by the discolored glass found 
everywhere to-day in Paris, even at Notre Dame. 
Crushing facades, white glass, the whole ugly and 
pretentious esthetic—it 1s the very image of the 
French Church, yesterday and to-day. It is the 
mournful official church of bourgeois and function- 
aries, which filled the rich with Jesuit sermons 
and picayune devotions, while the poor it sent 
empty away. } 

The neglect of the poor continued to the Revo- 
lution and the astonishing vacuity of devotion 
produced a certain reaction even in France. Saint 
Vincent de Paul founded the Lazarists and the 
Sisters of Charity for the general relief of suffering. 
Another Frenchman, Jean Baptiste de la Salle, 
organized the Christian Brothers for the education 


DECLINE OF THE GALLICAN CHURCH 2238 


of poor boys disdained by the Jesuits, hitherto 
the only powerful teaching Order. Finally a great 
churchman, an imbecile in politics, but after all a 
saint in his way, the Cardinal de Berulle, intro- 
duced a little Italian sun by the formation of the 
French Oratory, originally founded at Rome in 
the preceding century by Saint Philip Neri. The 
esthetic reform of the liturgy, a little art, a little 
good music, agreeable and sensible sermons, a 
trifle “‘broad’’—this is the secret of the Oratory 
(St. Sulpice) as it will be that of the Paulists in 
this country. The net result in France, at its best, 
was a sort of gloomy correctitude. Despite the 
Oratory, no two things could be more unlike than 
French Catholicism and the Church in Italy, so 
colorful, so appealing even in decay, so close to 
the people. The Gallican Church had other things 
in its head than to make itself loved. It was 
preé€minently the Church of the Monarchy and 
the great bourgeoisie; hence its invincible vul- 
garity. ‘That pretentious figure of fun, the szzsse 
or beadle, introduced by France into the mysteries 
of the sanctuary, is symbolic of this institution— 
a Church of occasional conformists, of gendarmes 
and of clerks. 

This Church revealed its innate Protestanism 
by the violent support which it gave the Monarchy 
against the rest of Christendom, even the Pope. 
France prided herself on the fact that, thanks to 


224 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


the Gallican liberties, she stood on a very different 
footing towards the Papacy than did Italy or 
Spain. The liberties in question were certain 
national and independent rights of the French 
Church whose origin was lost in the mists of time. 
They enabled Louis XIV to appoint bishops and 
insult Innocent XI in his own capital, at the same 
time that he was delivering his peaceful and unfor- 
tunate Protestant subjects to the tender mercies 
of his dragoons (1685). Henry VIII himself had 
hardly gone so far. 

A French historian, himself a former priest, has 
written: ‘‘While the Italian and Spanish theo- 
logians pushed their dogmatic deductions to the 
last extremes, while German mystics lost them- 
selves in redoubtable dreams, the French theo- 
logians never departed from a certain good sense, 
and did not cease to pride themselves on a certain 
erudition and fidelity to the past. Gallicanism 
was then, relatively speaking, a moderate Ca- 
tholicism, sensible, virile, moral, whose respectabil- 
ity was appreciated even by Protestants, and 
which was even considered by Utopians as the 
possible field of a chimerical union of Christian 
churches.” 

This estimate is far too favorable. An institu- 
tion, however penetrated by ‘‘a certain good 
sense,” which organized one of the most brutal 
religious persecutions in history, cannot be said 


DECLINE OF THE GALLICAN CHURCH 225 


to be moderate. It cannot be said to be free from 
redoubtable dreams when it produced Sister Mary 
Alacoque and the devotion of the Sacred Heart. 
Gallicanism founded or reformed a few religious 
communities, and produced a handful of eloquent 
court preachers, and that is all that can be stated 
in its favor. 

The Gallican Church emphasized its moderation 
by persecuting, under the inspiration of the Jes- 
uits, the only Catholics in France who ventured 
to think for themselves. I shall not detain the 
reader by a detailed account of the great Jansenist 
controversy which convulsed the French Church 
for nearly two centuries. The Jansenist school, 
whose Bethlehem was the melancholy hermitage 
of Port Royal, near Paris, rose to combat the sup- 
posed laxity of Jesuit morality. 

The Jesuits had recognized the uselessness of 
turning the clock back to the thirteenth century. 
Christ had died as much for the modern soldier 
and courtier and royal mistress as He had for any 
one else, and what such people required in their 
religious life was a rough working system, a ready- 
made code supplied by the most elementary 
“duties” of the Church—the confessional, the 
rosary, Holy Communion. Many of the casuists, 
like Saurez and St. Alphonsus Liguori, whom the 
Jansenists were never weary of vilifying, were, in 
their way, profound students of the soul, liberal 


226 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


and liberating moralists who purged the air of 
theological abstractions and terror, and were, very 
properly, concerned with the spirit rather than 
the letter of good conduct. The Jesuits, more- 
over, stressed the Christian and manly dogma of 
free will against the Jansenist doctrine of “irre- 
sistible grace,” which suggested Luther. “The 
Jesuits, with their practical good sense, could not 
admit such a doctrine because it tended, like 
Lutheranism, toward the neglect of those good 
works which benefited the Church and, it must be 
added, society at large.” The Jansenists were, 
however, perfectly good Catholics, subjected to a 
cruel and unnecessary persecution on the part of 
Louis XIV and his Jesuit confessors. I am no 
lover of the Port Royal school, but it must be 
admitted that it produced the patricians of French 
Catholicism in a bad age, and that its distin- 
guished and dolorous history commands consider- 
able respect. The Jansenists also enriched French 
literature, giving it Pascal and Racine. 

The sect perished about the year 1720 because 
it yielded to the same vapid miracle mongering, 
so popular generally in “the Church of good sense.” 
A Jansenist deacon named Paris, having died in 
the odor of sanctity, had been buried in the quaint 
cemetery of St. Médard. The Jansenists an- 
nounced that prodigies of healing were being 
enacted at his tomb, and the cemetery was invaded 


DECLINE OF THE GALLICAN CHURCH 227 


night and day by a crowd of idlers so that it had 
to be closed and a guard set at the gate, on which 
some humorist wrote: “By order of the King it 
is forbidden to perform any miracle in this place.” 

After the destruction of Port Royal came that 
of its enemies, the Jesuits. The movement against 
them began in France as soon as their penitent, 
the aged Sun-King, was out of the way. Their 
standard book of moral theology, their beloved 
“Busenbaum,”’ was burned by the hangman at 
Paris; there they were first called the enemies of 
the human race, and their dark reputation, later 
popularized by insensate anti-clericals like 
Michelet and Eugene Sue, dates from this period. 

Their first suppression took place in Portugal, 
where they had offended the all-powerful Minister, 
M. de Pombal, by their missionary tentative in 
Paraguay, called by Cunninghame Grahame “an 
experiment in civilization.” Their old father, 
Malagrida, was put to death, and the rest of them 
shipped off with small ceremony to the Papal 
States. The example of Portugal was speedily 
followed by the Bourbon government of Spain. 
Finally the government of Louis XV announced 
from Versailles that the society was dissolved in 
French territory. The whole nation exulted; even 
Voltaire, their defender, pointed sardonically to 
the ruins of Port Royal and said something pleas- 
ant about the biter bit. The reigning Pope, 


228 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Clement XIV, tried to protect them, but when 
the French government made a threatening move 
toward Avignon, still Papal territory, he saw rea- 
son, and in 1773 he decreed that the Society of 
Jesus had ceased to exist. It was only revived by 
Pius VII after the fall of Napoleon. 

The truth about the Order in its somewhat 
tortuous progress through the centuries is difficult 
to establish. My own opinion is that the Jesuits 
were not prodigies either of virtue or dissimula- 
tion. Despite their noble history in England under 
the Elizabethan persecution and their many con- 
tributions to science and education, they were, as 
individuals, rather pretentious and _ superficial 
mediocrities trading on a reputation for astuteness, 
constantly seeing their finest schemes miscarry 
and occasionally killing people quite by accident. 
It is worth noting that they underwent banishment 
and dissolution without trial or definite charges or 
any chance to defend themselves. 

Christianity had made such progress in the 
“Church of a certain good sense” that by the mid- 
dle of the eighteenth century there were as many as 
forty thousand avowed atheists in Paris alone. The 
new assault on the Church, sponsored by the 
Encyclopedia and the polemics of Voltaire, was, 
as Macaulay says, something better than mere 
incredulity. “If the Patriarch of the Holy Philo- 
sophical Church had contented himself with mak- 


DECLINE OF THE GALLICAN CHURCH 229 


ing jokes about Saul’s asses and David’s wives, 
and with criticizing the poetry of Ezekiel in the 
same spirit in which he criticized that of Shake- 
speare,’”’ Rome would have had no more to fear 
from him than it had to fear from Tom Paine or 
Colonel Ingersoll. ‘The real strength of the phi- 
losophers lay in the generous enthusiasm which was 
hidden beneath their flippancy and their apparent 
intolerance. They were men who with all their 
faults, moral and intellectual, desired the improve- 
ment of the condition of the human race, whose 
blood boiled at the sight of cruelty, who made 
manful war with every faculty which they pos- 
sessed on what they considered abuses, and 
who on many signal occasions placed themselves 
gallantly between the powerful and the oppressed. 
When a youth, guilty only of an indiscretion, was 
beheaded at Abbeville . . . a voice instantly went 
forth from the banks of Lake Leman which made 
itself heard from Moscow to Cadiz and which 
sentenced the unjust judges to the contempt and 
detestation of all Europe. The really efficient 
weapons with which the philosophers assailed the 
evangelical faith were borrowed from the evan- 
gelical morality. The ethical and dogmatical 
parts of the Gospel were turned against each other. 
On one side was a Church boasting of the purity 
of a doctrine derived from the Apostles, but dis- 
graced by the Bartholomew, by the (indirect) 


230 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


murder of the best of Kings, by the persecution 
of the Huguenots and the destruction of Port 
Royal. On the other side was a sect laughing at 
the Scriptures, shooting out its tongue at the Sac- 
raments, but ready to encounter principalities and 
powers in the cause of justice, mercy and toler- 
ation.”’ * 

What institution could survive, with all its im- 
becilities and abuses intact, the annihilating irony 
of words like these: 

“Transport yourselves with me to the day on 
which all men will be judged, when God will deal 
with all according to his works. I see all the dead 
of former ages, and of our own, stand in His pres- 
ence. Are you sure that our Creator and Father 
will say to the wise and virtuous Confucius, to 
Socrates, to Plato, to the divine Antonines, to 
Titus, the delight of the human race, and to so 
many other model men: ‘Go, monsters, and submit 
to a chastisement infinite in its intensity and dura- 
tion. And you, my beloved, Jacques Clément, 
Ravaillac, Damiens, etc.,f who have died with the 
prescribed formule, come and share my empire 
and felicity forever.” t 

Thanks above all to the genius of Voltaire and 
his friends, that glorious Gallican Church, so much 
more Catholic than the Pope that it made war on 


* Macaulay. 
+ French Catholic fanatics and regicides. 
¢ Voltaire: Essay on Toleration. 


DECLINE OF THE GALLICAN CHURCH 231 


him, was at so low an ebb on the eve of the Revo- 
lution that Louis XVI opposed the nomination of 
Brienne as Archbishop of Paris on the ground that 
the latter ought at the very least to believe in 
God. 


CHAPTER XXII 
NINETY-THREE 


Ir is an error to suppose that the great Revolu- 
tion which completed the eighteenth century and 
overturned the old order of things in France, ex- 
ploded from below, or that it was, in its origins, 
the work of a mob. Ideas seldom manifest them- 
selves from below. The Revolution was an idea, 
a philosophy, born in the restless brains of a few 
intellectuals, and worked out by a combination of 
liberal nobles, enlightened parliamenteers, and, 
strange to say, by a part of the clergy. The 
formula of this new philosophy is contained in the 
three words which ornament, somewhat ironically, 
the facades of French public buildings—liberty, 
equality, fraternity. These are the fundamental 
“rights of man,” formulated in a spirit of true 
fanatical French logic by the privileged class and 
communicated to the middle class. The German 
Marie Antoinette was not far wrong when she 
said, alluding to that French noblesse so fatal to 
her and hers: “These people will ruin us.” 

What unchained the Revolution in 1789 was the 


financial collapse of France. The country con- 
232 


NINETY-THREE 233 


fronted national bankruptcy, a condition which 
became yearly more hopeless due to all the anti- 
quated follies and abuses dear to the conservative 
French heart, due also to all sorts of reckless in- 
efficiencies, expenditures and sheer waste. Every- 
thing called for retrenchment, reform and the 
creation of a sensible constitution by the represen- 
tatives of the whole nation. The latter had a good 
opportunity to air their grievances and those of 
their constituents in the National Assembly which 
convened at Versailles in May, 1789, and after 
assisting like the body of good French conformists 
it was at the Mass of the Holy Spirit, got seriously 
down to the work of formulating the new con- 
stitution. In the meantime, it may be said, the 
country was not rendered any more prosperous by 
these fine preliminaries. The promulgation of 
the Rights of Man did not, as by a miracle, pro- 
duce foodstuffs nor fill the empty treasury. There 
was only one French corporation which, to all 
appearances, was pretty well off, and this was the 
Catholic Church. 

At first glance the Church seemed to have noth- 
ing to fear from the general overturn. The mass 
of the parish clergy, the curés, miserably paid, and 
living so close to the peasant that they shared in 
a measure the latter’s grievances, were disposed 
to support the political revolution. Even the 
great prelates, imbued as many of them were with 


234 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


the new spirit, were not generally detested. The 
clergy remained in this state of nebulous neutrality 
until a deputy, in the course of argument, let fall 
the ominous sentence: “The goods of the Church 
belong to the nation.” 

Since the ecclesiastical estates were valued at 
four thousand millions of francs, this suggestion 
took fire instantly, but discussion of the question 
was interrupted by the sensational episodes of 
October 5 and 6, 1789, when a mob of hooligans 
and fishwives arrived at Versailles and compelled 
the court and Assembly to remove to Paris. Two 
days later (October 8) the discussion on church 
property was resumed. The work of regenerating 
France had gone to the Assembly’s head. Nothing 
seemed easier than to summon a whole lost At- 
lantis called the primitive Church from the vasty 
deeps, and it was not the shadowy Gallican Com- 
munion which would wave a wand and bid it dis- 
appear. Mirabeau, answering the clergy’s ob- 
jections on the question of property, told them 
loftily that they could not possess for the simple 
reason that they did not exist. The ecclesiastics 
gasped. “Precisely,” continued the orator, “‘moral 
bodies, such as the Church, created by the State, 
are not bodies in a proper sense of the word like 
sentient beings. hey have an ideal moral exist- 
ence conferred: by the State, their creator. The 
State made them and causes them to live.” He 


NINETY-THREE 235 


might have added that when the State withholds its 
generating breath, they might die, and a good rid- 
dance. 

The great anticlericals of the Middle Ages, the 
Hohenstaufens, and Philip the Fair, doubtless 
stirred in their tombs at such words, rejoicing to 
see this day. It had taken about two centuries 
of spiritual vacuity, accompanied by a frantic 
toadying to the civil power, to bring the French 
Church to the point when it could be told with a 
certain justice that it did not exist. 

It must have been pretty clear now to the clergy 
what they were in for. Dreadful visions of Henry 
VIII, imitated by the politest people of the world, 
of dispossession, disestablishment, schism from 
Rome; of an enforced French patriarchate with its 
attendant heresies, martyrdoms and_ horrors, 
loomed before them. Nothing less, in the actual 
result, satisfied the idealogues of the Assembly. On 
July 12, 1790, was promulgated the Civil Constitu- 
tion of the Clergy. Priests were to be elected to 
their parishes, and bishops to their dioceses. Both 
orders were to be paid by the State which offered 
for the first time to the submerged curés a living 
wage. Clergymen might marry. The convents 
were suppressed, with the exception of one mother- 
house to each order; all monks and nuns who with- 
drew from the religious life received pensions. The 
whole body of the clergy was compelled to register 


236 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


their approval of these resolutions by a solemn 
oath. 

The fate of the clergy depended on the Pope. 
In the autumn Pius VI came out flatly against the 
Civil Constitution, and a majority of the French 
clergy was forced into a position of open rebellion 
against the revolutionary government. In making 
allegiance to the Civil Constitution a test of na- 
tional loyalty the Assembly committed the mistake 
of according a fine opportunity to pose as martyrs 
to a number of worthless ecclesiastics. When 
required to take the oath a curé, Leclerc, replied 
simply: “I am a child of the Catholic Church.” 
This was the attitude of the majority, including 
most of the prelates. Yet, with the doubtful excep- 
tion of the marriage of priests, there was nothing 
specifically anti-Catholic in the Civil Constitution. 
The Archbishop of Narbonne was nearer the truth 
when he said years later under Napoleon: “We 
behaved like true noblemen; for it cannot be said 
of the majority of us that we acted from motives 
of religion.” 

From this point things moved quickly. In June, 
1791, the King and his family attempted to escape 
from France. They almost reached the frontier, 
but were stopped at Varennes in the Argonne and 
brought back. The Constitutional Monarchy be- 
ing evidently a farce, a coalition, organized by the 
emigrant nobles and backed with men and money 


NINETY-THREE 237 


by Prussia and Austria, prepared to invade France 
and restore the old régime. The nation watched 
with accumulating fear and anger their government 
weeping with one eye and laughing with the other; 
their king declaring war with tears on the coali- 
tion, his only hope; and their disaffected Church 
praying night and day for the defeat of the Revolu- 
tion by enemy arms. From the standpoint of the 
national defense it was an impossible situation, 
and on the 10th of August, 1792, it was ended when 
an organized mob, directed by the Commune or 
municipal Paris government, stormed the Tuileries 
and imprisoned the King and his family in the 
medieval palace of the Templars, still haunted by 
memories of that tragic and equivocal Order. 
Martial visits were made to the homes of every 
one suspected of sympathizing with the foreign in- 
vasion, and all well known “aristocrats” and non- 
juring priests were arrested and shut up in prisons 
or in churches converted into prisons, the Abbaye, 
the Carmes, etc. 

In the meanwhile Longwy capitulated to the 
coalition, followed by the fall of Verdun. The 
road to Paris appeared open to the enemy. Panic 
is the cruelest of passions, and on Sunday, the 
2nd of September, a mob of professional killers, 
hired by the Commune, broke into the prisons, and 
after a primitive species of trial, massacred the 
inmates, including all the priests on whom they 


288 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


could lay hands. Any Catholic clergyman who 
had refused the oath was regarded as a political 
prisoner, in short a traitor, and killed. 

The new Republican Government was organized 
early in 1793 amid this atmosphere of terror and 
murder. It consisted of a national legislature 
called the Convention; a small executive, the Com- 
mittee of Public Safety, of which Robespierre soon 
became the tutelary spirit; and the famous Revo- 
lutionary Tribunal, with its daily batch of political 
victims, as a judiciary. The King was executed. 
The coalition was in course of time hurled back 
from the frontiers, pursued into its own territories 
by the banners of the Rights of Man. Until the 
complete emergence of Robespierre as practical 
dictator, the real power was the Commune of Paris, 
which terrorized the city and the national govern- 
ment. It consisted of a set of sanguinary droles 
whose heads were completely turned by their 
awful eminence. The Constituent Assembly had 
attempted to reorganize religion; the Commune 
now had a turn at annihilating it altogether. 
France had never been formally de-Christianized, 
but due to the fact that a large proportion of the 
clergy were non-juring and hence out of law, the 
churches were closed, and the cult was mostly prac- 
ticed in a subterranean fashion, in catacombs and 
barns. In the autumn of 1793 the Commune 
staged an immense costume piece in the Cathedral 


NINETY-THREE 239 


of Notre Dame where an actress was enthroned on 
the high altar as Goddess of Reason to the peal of 
civic chants with words by Chénier. ‘The cor- 
responding spectacle at Saint Eustache,” says Mer- 
cier, the diarist of the Revolution, “offered the 
vision of a vast tavern. Round the choir stood 
tables loaded with bottles, sausages, pork-puddings 
and pastries. The guests flowed in and out through 
all doors; whosoever presented himself took part 
of the good things; children of eight, girls as 
well as boys, put hand to plate in sign of Liberty; 
they drank also of the bottles, and their prompt in- 
toxication created laughter... .’ “Other mys- 
teries,”’ adds Carlyle, “seemingly of a Paphian char- 
acter we leave under the veil which appropriately 
stretches itself along the pillars of the aisles.” 
On becoming dictator the next year, Robespierre 
put a stop to these pleasing buffooneries. He had 
been an ecclesiastical lawyer, brought up as a 
protégé of the Bishop of Arras, and was hence no 
enemy of the priests. In the late spring of 1794 
he dedicated the Republic to the Supreme Being, 
by which he meant the somewhat nebulous divinity 
of his master, Rousseau, and he did his best to 
spare the Catholic clergy any violent persecution. 
All this time some remarkable ecclesiastics had con- 
tinued to sit and legislate in the Convention, the 
most notable of whom was the Abbé Grégoire who 
died a bishop under the Empire. Calm in his place, 


240 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


arrayed in his cassock and violet sash, this noble 
and public-spirited priest had tried throughout to 
reconcile the Catholic faith with the somewhat 
horrifying progress of the Revolution. When the 
Commune’s movement of de-Christianization was 
in full swing, and “goose Gobel,” Republican Arch- 
bishop of Paris, together with his cathedral chap- 
ter, loudly proclaimed themselves atheists, Gré- 
goire refused to follow them. The government had 
the good sense to tolerate one Catholic legislator 
in its midst, saying: “‘We force no one: let Gré- 
goire consult his conscience.” This he always did 
through four régimes. Years later, under Napo- 
leon, an old man in episcopal dress could occa- 
sionally be seen wandering through the abandoned 
tennis court at Versailles where the first drama 
of the Revolution had been enacted. Revolution 
and war had come and gone, the tyranny of the 
multitude had been succeeded by that of the one, 
and still the reign of brotherhood had not come. 
This superannuated spectator of so much grandeur, 
terror and decadence was Grégoire. 

The priests did not fare any better for the fall 
of Robespierre in Thermidor. The Catholic reli- 
gion could still be practiced only clandestinely. 
Moreover the fury of Republican anti-clericalism 
escaped from France, spread over Europe and at- 
tacked the Papacy. An army left by Bonaparte, 
who was then in Egypt, invaded the Hapsburg pos- 


» NINETY-THREE 241 


sessions in Italy, lit their pipes from altar-candles 
and imprisoned the Pope in his own palace. Pius 
VI implored his enemies to let him die where he 
had lived, but they replied that he could die any- 
where. They tore the ring of Peter from his trem- 
bling hand, took him to France, where he died 
miserably the 14th of August, 1799. 

It was finished then, the Church instituted by 
the Son of God, watered by the blood of martyrs 
and Apostles, the religion of the Empire, the tri- 
umphant theocracy of Gregory and Innocent, the 
papal super-state of the Middle Ages and the 
Renaissance. Already shaken by the Protestant 
revolt, it had gone down in blood and ruin before 
a handful of men in tricolored sashes. The chain 
had snapped off at its weakest link. The particu- 
lar Church which had knelt before the government 
of the Sun-King, and had bent still lower to the 
government of a prostitute, had slain itself at the 
feet of the gentlemen of 793. And the prince of 
bishops, he who had always resisted the absolute 
State, whether it called itself Frederick or Philip, 
Henry or Elizabeth, Louis or Ninety-Three or even 
“the Little Corporal,” had fallen with his brethren. 

Yet all was not lost. ‘The future of Rome,” 
said an acute observer, Count von Moltke, “does 
not depend on Rome itself, but on the direction 
which religion will take in other countries.” In 
other continents, he should have added. In 1783 


242 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


“the greatest birth of time” had already attained 
its consummation. The creation of a new state of 
vast size, of a scope for political and religious expe- 
riment no less vast, provided a saving plank for the 
institution which seemed to be drowning as the 
eighteenth century ended. In America, the Catho- 
lic Church was free of its old enemy—the absolute 
State—and there in the person of the Calverts it 
had already atoned for centuries of intolerance by 
the first charter of religious toleration. In the 
American Republic, the State was the people, and 
the State was never to be lord of the Church. 
Moreover, since the people were of different reli- 
gions—Catholic, Anglican, Calvinist, Jew—a single 
creed could never come to inform and dominate the 
State. The slate was clean, and the new nation 
was built up under God upon disestablishment, 
Cavour’s “free Church in a free State,” a principle 
embodied in the first amendment to the Constitu- 
tion. In this Republic, officially non-sectarian and 
atmospherically Calvinist, the Catholic Church was 
destined to prosper as she had never prospered in 
any European country of Catholic stock since the 
Middle Ages. 

But in Europe everything seemed over. For 
nearly a year after the capture of Pius VI the 
Church was without a head. In France it was out- 
lawed. The noblest edifices from the Gothic period 
were closed, or turned into Masonic lodges and 


NINETY-THREE 243 


banks. In Rome the tricolored flag floated from 
the top of Sant’ Angelo. In England Catholicism 
had apparently dived underground forever, save 
for the presence of exiled French ecclesiastics liv- 
ing on Anglican alms. In 1799 there was not one 
public man who would have ventured to say that 
the Catholic religion was not a lost cause, a faith 
as extinct as that of the Manichees. This time 
the milk-white hind seemed definitely dead. 














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CHAPTER XXIII 
ROMANTICISM 


In the first year of the nineteenth century, a 
stately little gentleman might have been seen 
brushing his teeth each morning at the windows of 
his lodging, No. 27 rue Saint Dominque. On the 
dressing-table lay the proofs of his last book which 
bore the title: The Genius of Christianity. 'The 
name of this imposing little man was the Vicomte 
René de Chateaubriand, popular author of some 
brilliant political tracts and a couple of flamboyant 
romances dealing with the noble redskins of the Iro- 
quois. In literary histories he is known as the 
father of Romanticism. 

There is no occasion here to deal in detail with 
M. de Chateaubriand’s book. It has been called 
epoch-making, but it was rather the epoch which 
made it. It appeared on Easter Sunday, 1802, the 
same day that a solemn Te Deum was chanted at 
Notre Dame in thanksgiving for the Concordat re- 
establishing the Catholic Church in France and con- 
cluded with the Pope by the head of the French 
government, the First Consul, Napoleon Bona- 


parte. 
247 


248 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Napoleon had need of the Pope and the Church, 
and was exerting every effort to popularize religion, 
and incidentally himself as its restorer. Never 
then did a work on Christianity appear under hap- 
pier conditions of publicity. “Chateaubriand was 
able to consider himself with Bonaparte as the 
restorer of the true faith, and he did not fail to say 
so.” 

The Genius of Christianity struck the tone of 
nineteenth century Catholicism, a phase which 
coincided with the literary movement called Ro- 
manticism, also inaugurated by Chateaubriand. 
There is no need to analyze profoundly this great 
Christian apologist; a few phrases picked at ran- 
dom suffice to give the atmosphere. When the 
author speaks of the dogmatic mysteries of the 
faith, the Trinity for example, he is priceless. .. . 
“The Trinity was perhaps known to the Egyptians 
. . . Plato seems conversant with this dogma... . 
One is able to discover traces of it in the fables 
of Greek mythology, notably in the three 
GrECES ee 

As for the Redemption, it is “touching.” The 
Sacrament of the Real Presence is invested with 
a “charming” pomp. Elsewhere he emphasizes the 
influence of the Church upon the arts, on music, 
painting, architecture, and is the first of his time 
to mention the despised Gothic churches with ad- 
miration, thus preparing a profitable theme for 


ROMANTICISM 249 


the neo-Christians who succeeded him. To sum 
up, the author is anxious to disassociate himself 
from the mere brute faith of the charcoal-burner, 
and is equally anxious to impress the men of taste 
and amateurs of style penetrated with the Vol- 
tairian tradition, for whom he is writing. His 
apologia is an appeal to the poetic sense, the imag- 
inative instinct, and his method is to hand out 
amusing erudition, images, metaphors, descrip- 
tions, phrases in a word. Thus he is, in a way, 
responsible for the modern Catholicism of snob- 
bism and the drawing-room which is an odious 
thing; he has also produced, even in the Christian 
pulpit, the literary tone, the Paulist tone, and 
similar bad tones; in short, he has produced Catho- 
lic Romanticism. 

What is Romanticism in a Catholic sense? 
Briefly, it may be described as religious sentiment 
without faith. It consists in comprehending, re- 
specting and sensuously enjoying, for their stimu- 
lating effects, their plastic beauty or their social 
utility, the dogmas which, at heart, one has ceased 
to believe. I do not know why I have limited this 
phenomenon to the nineteenth century as if it had 
ceased to exist in the twentieth. The presence of 
MM. Maurras and de Montherlant, of “ritual- 
ism” and the Gothic Quest, of Chesterton and 
Belloc, of Catholic dilettantism and Catholic prag- 
matism generally in our midst, attest that it is a 


250 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


spirit which is still active. To-day we have two 
groups of Catholics—the multitude calling itself 
“the faithful,” and the Romantics. The latter are 
Catholic, either because that religion seems to 
“work” in a social sense, or more often because it 
titillates their sentimentality. Both types seem 
equally resentful of criticism and new ideas, even 
of old ones when the latter have the air of novelty. 
And, as a result of this nullity, based either on ig- 
norance or on the intellectual suicide known as 
pragmatism, the Catholic world has produced no 
art worth mentioning since the Reformation. The 
genius of art has so completely abandoned the 
Church in our time that even its authentic liturgy 
and its matchless music are everywhere scamped 
and mistreated. Pulpit dialogues, popular devo- 
tions and similar catch-penny tricks, borrowed 
from the Protestants, have replaced in this country 
the liturgical glories of the missal and breviary, 
and not even an encyclical of the late Pius X could 
restore Gregorian chant to anything like its proper 
place in a Church which prefers to vamp out its 
services with opera tunes and sweet-stuff. 

The neo-Catholic spirit operated in various 
ways in different countries during the first half 
of the nineteenth century. In France there was a 
liberal Catholic movement during the thirties led 
by two laymen, Lamennais and the Count de Mon- 
talembert, and by a Dominican, Lacordaire, which 


ROMANTICISM 251 


attempted to continue the dream of Grégoire and 
the Christians of 793, and reconcile the Catholic 
faith with the democratic revolution. The move- 
ment was condemned at Rome; Lamennais left 
the Church and Lacordaire devoted the remainder 
of his life to preaching missions and corresponding 
with his numerous converts. 

In England the rage for ruins and the romances 
of Sir Walter Scott penetrated even to the Estab- 

lished Church. We have had no occasion to men- 
tion that body since its final establishment by 
Queen Elizabeth in 1559. Its claim to be, at least 
a schismatic, and at most, a perfected branch of 
the Catholic Church, is our only reason for dis- 
cussing it finally here. By 1833 when the Oxford 
Movement commenced it had become a thoroughly 
Protestantized body. Its single surviving link with 
the Catholic past—the Apostolic Succession of 
properly consecrated bishops and priests—was 
scarcely taken very seriously by the portly indi- 
viduals in magpies and lawn sleeves who were 
the bishops of the Establishment. In short, the 
Church of England seemed to be the net result of 
revolution and compromise; of the necessities of 
the State; of the peculiar position and tempera- 
ment of the Virgin Queen. But to Newman and 
Pusey, founders of the Oxford Movement, it was 
something very different. It was, to borrow the 
vocabulary of Mr. Strachey, . . . “a transcendent 


252 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


manifestation of divine power floating down 
through the ages; a consecrated priesthood stretch- 
ing back, through the mystic laying on of hands, 
to the very Godhead; a whole universe of beings 
brought into communion with the Eternal by means 
of wafers.” This supernatural and truly Catholic 
organization, declared the High Church school, 
had, in the course of time, become enslaved by the 
civil power, and profoundly withered and corroded 
by the Protestant spirit. It was the plain duty of 
Newman and Keble and other bright young men to 
re-catholicize the English Church, if need be, 
against its own will; the ultimate result would 
satisfy at once the Lord and John Bull, and the 
great shibboleth of that sainted sovereign, Henry 
VIII, would be realized: Catholicism without 
Popery. 

This, to the best of my knowledge, is the High 
Church or Anglo-Catholic theory. It has always 
met with considerable opposition from the large 
number of Episcopalians on both continents who 
regard themselves as Protestants and perversely 
wish to remain so. Nevertheless, in the course of 
time, the High Church faction has gradually at- 
tained an equal, almost a majoritarian, position 
in the teeth of their unwilling brethren. It has 
restored one by one various practices of the old 
faith, such as auricular confession, prayers for the 
dead, a divine service which, thanks to the restora- 


) 


ROMANTICISM 253 


tion of Catholic ceremonial, is practically the Mass 
in English, and, finally, the monastic life, repre- 
sented in this country by the Cowley Fathers, the 
Order of the Holy Cross and by several communi- 
ties of nuns. In England, at least, it has done good 
work among the city poor by palliating their drab 
existence with a romantic and full-blooded religion 
very superior to the blankets-and-soup nullity of 
official Anglicanism. 

After all, it is delightful to consider oneself in 
full communion with Ambrose and Augustin, Saint 
Louis and Francis of Assisi, and at the same time 
to sniff at the pontifical figure whom all these 
worthies regarded as Christ’s vicegerent on earth 
The Anglo-Catholics, almost alone among Chris- 
tian bodies since the Reformation, have been en- 
abled, by historical accident and the force of their 
own theory, to eat their cake and have it too. 


CHAPTER XXIV 
ULTRAMONTANISM 


THE opinion that religion of some positive sort 
is the best guarantee of social order was quite pop- © 
ular in government circles during the general re- 
action which succeeded the fall of Napoleon. Even 
the hybrid coalition which overthrew him was 
unwillingly persuaded by the Czar of Russia to call 
itself the Holy Alliance (1815-1830). The “big 
four” among the powers, only one of whom, Aus- 
tria, was Catholic, restored to Pius VII Rome and 
the Papal State which Bonaparte in one of his 
numerous squabbles with that pontiff had taken 
away. Orthodox Russia, Lutheran Prussia and 
Low Church England regarded, this restoration 
with approval. Better that Antichrist should reign 
over the Seven Hills than the spirit of Ninety-three. 
It is due in part to this first and remarkable out- 
burst of Christian pragmatism even among non- 
Catholic powers that the Roman Catholic hierarchy 
was once more triumphantly restored in Victorian 
England. 

Ever since the religious settlement by Queen 


Elizabeth in 1559 the English Catholics had suf- 
254 


ULTRAMONTANISM 255 


fered from the gravest disabilities. To be sure 
the more inhuman Penal Laws had become a com- 
plete dead letter since the seventeenth century, 
but before 1828 Catholics were still deprived of 
English citizenship. In that year and the following 
they were given the right to vote and to hold 
office. Toward the middle of the century, the 
head of the Catholic body, a bulky and genial prel- 
ate, Cardinal Wiseman, erroneously supposed to 
have inspired Browning’s “Bishop Bloughram,” 
acting on orders from Rome, divided the English 
map into dioceses which, to avoid a postal confusion 
with those of the Establishment, were given new 
names. This unexpected action on the part of the 
Papal See did not pass unremarked, either by the 
English government or the country at large. Queen 
Victoria uttered, for the twentieth time, the words: 
“Am I not Queen of England?” while Mr. Glad- 
stone, then rising in fame, displayed his most poly- 
syllabic rhetoric in denouncing the evils of ‘“Vati- 
canism” and “Roman aggressions.” But for all 
that, the Catholic hierarchy, fortified by some 
notable conversions at that time from the Anglican 
fold, became again a visible and recognized fact in 
English social and religious life. 

In the meanwhile, the States of the Church in 
Italy were in a rather bad way. Brigandage, petty 
tyranny and bad sanitation flourished to a strik- 
ingly inappropriate degree in the patrimony of 


256 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Saint Peter, and on the death of the reigning occu- 
pant, Gregory XVI in 1846 it was reckoned that 
there were some 2,000 Romans, either in exile or 
in prison. 

Gregory XVI was succeeded by one of the young- 
est of his cardinals, a man of amiable disposition 
and liberal sympathies, who ascended the papal 
throne as Pius IX. For a moment the Papacy 
seemed destined to a new era the like of which 
had not been known since the early medieval days 
of Alexander III and the patriotic Lombard league 
against the German Cesar. The new Pope at once 
opened the doors of the prisons, issued a liberal 
constitution to his states, and there were even 
rumors abroad that he intended to head an Italian 
confederation to throw off the detested Austrian 
yoke of Metternich and Francis Joseph. Italy, as 
everyone knows, had been a “geographical expres- 
sion” in the beak of the Austrian eagle ever since 
the fall of Napoleon. Never did the double rdéle 
of the Papacy afflict its possessor with a crueler 
embarrassment. As an Italian prince and a liberal, 
Pio Nono doubtless disliked the Austrian suprem- 
acy over his native country, but was he not also 
the father of all Catholics, and was not Austria the 
foremost Catholic power left in this distracted 
world? ‘To make war on her would then be tanta- 
mount to abdicating the international character of 
the Papacy which is, in the long run, its greatest 


ULTRAMONTANISM 257 


strength. Accordingly he hesitated to act, and his _ 
hesitation was fatal to his popularity. The Ro- © 
mans, imbued with the spirit of Mazzini and 
“voung Italy” revolted in 48, and the Pope was 
forced to flee to Geta, where he placed himself 
under the protection of his edifying friend, King 
Bomba of Naples. In the meantime the French 
Prince-President, Louis Napoleon, who had his rea- 
sons for wishing to please the French Catholics, 
decided to intervene in the Pope’s favor. Two 
years later Pio Nono returned to Rome, a sadder 
and a wiser man, escorted by French and Austrian 
bayonets. All his early liberalism had been shaken 
out of him by his harrowing experience. In 1867 
Victor Emmanuel, King of Sardinia and Piedmont, 
who had replaced the Pope as the leader of a unified 
and revolutionary Italy, was master of the penin- 
sula, except for the Papal States where the Pope 
still reigned, less, as Mr. Strachey puts it, by the 
grace of God than by the grace of Napoleon III. 
This was the Pope’s political situation on the 
eve of the Vatican Council which gave us the 
formal declaration of Papal Infallibility. In pro- 
portion as his temporal power waned, the more this 
mystic and authoritative old man desired to rule as 
absolutely as possible over the wills and consciences 
of men. The great need of the times, in the opin- 
ion of the ruling classes at least, was, as I have sug- 
gested above, authority, and the latter was most 


258 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


likely to strike the imaginations of the faithful 
‘when embodied vividly in the person of the Pope. 
~ Papal Infallibility was by no means a new idea, 
but it was a new dogma; in other words, something 
that was hitherto a pious opinion received the char- 
acter of a revealed truth which it would be a sin 
for any Catholic to question. In any case, the 
Papacy was not in the least afraid of new ideas so 
long as the latter redounded to its own spiritual 
prestige. John Henry Newman, a convert from 
subtle Oxford, had shown the “Ultramontanes” 
as the party of Infallibility was called, the better 
way. In his Essay on the Development of Chris- 
tian Doctrine (1845) he introduced the suggestive 
idea that the Catholic faith was not revealed in 
its entirety once and for all by its divine Founder, 
nor by the Apostles and Doctors who succeeded 
Him. Many things might, as it were, have been 
left to the free wills of the faithful to work out for 
themselves, and among these might there not be 
that bright hidden jewel in the triple crown—Infal- 
libility. Was not this doctrine obviously implied 
when Christ enjoined the first pope to “feed his 
sheep” and to “‘strengthen his brethren.” It might 
indeed be so, and yet—. Even Newman doubted 
and drew back, somewhat aghast at the applica- 
tion of his theories in the Italian hands of Pio 
Nono and the Ultramontanes. He was as alarmed 
at the unwelcome success of “doctrinal develop- 


ULTRAMONTANISM 259 


ment” at Rome as the late Mr. Wilson might 
have been had he lived to have seen the 
progress of his doctrine of the rights of small 
minorities in the Arabian desert and in Egypt. 
Moreover, the doctrine of development had a 
double edge and could cut in two ways. Through 
the enticing door opened by Newman, Papal In- 
fallibility walked in, and the Modernists, headed 
by M. Loisy, in a very short time walked out. 

At this point I cannot resist quoting from Mr. 
Strachey who has written wittily upon this crisis 
in the Church’s affairs: 

“Rome was still the capital of the Papal State; 
she was not yet the capital of Italy. The last 
hour of this strange dominion had almost struck. 
As if she knew her doom was upon her the Eternal 
City arrayed herself to meet it in all her glory. 
The whole world seemed to be gathered together 
within her walls. Her streets were filled with 
crowned heads and Princes of the Church, great 
ladies and great theologians, artists and friars, dip- 
lomats and newspaper reporters. Seven thousand 
bishops were there from all the corners of Chris- 
tendom, and in all the varieties of ecclesiastical 
magnificence, in falling lace and sweeping purple 
and flowing violet veils. Cardinals passed, hatted 
and robed, in their enormous carriages of state 
like mysterious painted idols. Then there was a 
sudden hush; the crowd grew thicker and expecta- 


260 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


tion filled the air. Yes! It was he! He was com- 
ing! The Holy Father! But first there appeared, 
mounted on a white mule and clothed in a magenta 
mantle, a grave dignitary bearing aloft a silver 
cross. The golden coach followed, drawn by six 
horses gorgeously caparisoned, and within the 
smiling white-haired Pio Nono scattering his bene- 
dictions, while the multitude fell on its knees like 
one man. Such were the daily spectacles of col- 
ored pomp and of antique solemnity which dazzled 
the onlooker into a happy forgetfulness of the re- 
verse side of the Papal dispensation—the nauseat- 
ing filth of the highways, the cattle stabled in the 
palaces of the great, and the fever flitting through 
the ghastly tenements of the poor.” * 

The Vatican Council, of which all this was the 
introduction, opened in December, 1869, and 
lasted eight months. | It was the first general Coun- 
eil of the Church to be held since that of Trent, 
which had opened the Counter Reform of the six- 
teenth century. Among other minor questions, the 
following canon of which I shall have more to say, 
was laid down by the fathers of 1870: “If any 
one say that it is not possible by the natural light 
of human reason to acquire a certain knowledge of 
the One and True God let him be anathema.” 
‘Toward the end of the deliberations regarding In- 
fallibility, the French government of Napoleon 

* Lytton Strachey: Essay on Cardinal Manning. 


ULTRAMONTANISM 261 


III, which disliked the impending definition, de- 
cided to intervene, but in view of the Franco- 
Prussian War, which was also impending, the Pope 
saw that he could afford to laugh at the French 
government. On July 18, 1870, the Council met 
for the last time, and Papal Infallibility was de- 
fined. 

The pope, it was decided, was only infallible 
when he spoke ex cathedra upon a question relating 
to faith or morals. Thus His Holiness was by defi- 
nition precluded from stating infallibly that the 
weather is cool when it is indubitably eighty in the 
shade. His infallibility does not extend to matters 
of fact, only to matters of speculation among which 
religion stands first. The great obscurity in the 
definition lies in the precise circumstances under 
which the Pope speaks ex cathedra. ‘The general 
impression among Catholics seems to be that he 
so speaks when surrounded by a general Council 
similar to the one of 1870 which accepted him as 
infallible. If this be the case there is little that is 
revolutionary in Infallibility. 

The next day war was declared between France 
and Prussia, and a few months later the troops of 
Victor Emmanuel possessed Rome; the contempo- 
rary history of Italy as a national power com- 
menced. The Pope refused to recognize the legal- 
ity of the new government which deprived him of 
a temporal power dating from the dark ages. , The 


262 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Italian government offered him every possible 
guarantee, but up to date the two powers in Italy 
are Officially unreconciled, and a certain type of 
Catholic still likes to describe the Pope as “the 
prisoner of the Vatican.” 


CHAPTER XXV 
MODERNISM 


Pio Nono was succeeded by a tolerant pope, 
Leo XIII (1878-1903). Ever since the time of 
Goethe and Kant, the intellectual leadership of 
Europe had been passing into the hands of the 
Germans with their somewhat too pronounced pas- 
sion for literal exactitude, and this transformation 
of ideas, directed by the German school, was re- 
flected in the Catholic Church through the move- 
ment loosely called Modernism. On one side it 
was an effort to apply the latest standards of 
scientific and historical criticism to Christian ori- 
gins; on another side, it was a vague, up-to-date 
mysticism, tending to exaggerate Newman’s doc- 
trinal development, and to bring the Catholic faith 
more in alignment with the shifting spirit of the 
age. 

In the second year of his pontificate, Leo XIII 
elevated Newman to the cardinalate, thus seeming 
to set a seal of sanction upon the innocent and 
orthodox begetter of the Modernist spirit. At 


the same time there was a rumor that the Pope 
263 


264 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


was on the eve of reconciliation with the Italian 
government and the House of Savoy, but such 
rumors were totally unfounded. Leo XIII was 
quite as convinced as his medieval predecessors 
that the lost temporal power was essential to the 
Papacy’s moral independence, and his revolution- 
ary tendencies were directed upon countries other 
than his own. The Triple Alliance of Italy with 
Germany and Austria, coupled with the influence 
of his Secretary of State, Cardinal Rampolla, who 
was pro-French, turned the Pope’s attention upon 
the third Republic, once the ancient kingdom of 
Clovis and Charlemagne, “‘the eldest daughter of 
the Roman Church.” He enjoined the French 
Catholics to abandon their besotted longings after 
a, lost Bourbon monarchy, and to rally to Republi- 
can institutions. His encyclicals became increas- 
ingly more startling for a Pope, their generally lib- 
eral color being ultimately streaked with a pale 
tinge of contemporary Socialism. Partly under his 
influence, a Christian Socialist movement sprang 
up even in non-Catholic countries like Germany 
and England, where in the latter instance it found 
harborage under the wing of the High Church party 
which was being discouraged and even persecuted 
by the government. The Populists of Italy and the 
Centrist party of the German Republic are the off- 
spring of this movement. 

Leo’s pacific policy towards France was ruined 


MODERNISM 265 


as usual by the behavior of a large proportion of 
the French Catholics. In December, 1894, an 
Israelite officer, Major Dreyfus, was condemned for 
treason. Ever since the disaster of 1870, the 
Army had been the great pet of all classes in the 
nation; and it was strangely felt that to revise 
the Dreyfus trial, on the basis of fresh evidence 
establishing his innocence, would somehow dis- 
credit the army. It is perhaps an exaggeration 
to say that the entire French Church threw its 
influence on the scale of injustice, but if this 
had really been the case, it would have been 
wholly in keeping with the Gallican tradition. One 
religious order, the Assumptionists, a gang of com- 
mercial monks, reeking with the spirit of the 
League, did distinguish itself abominably in the 
campaign to prevent a second trial. The upshot 
of what was really a reign of terror and almost a 
civil war, was that Dreyfus was pardoned by Presi- 
dent Loubet, and regained his rank in 1906. But 
the behavior of a sufficiently numerous and odi- 
ously noisy body of French Catholics reacted dis- 
astrously upon the Church itself. In 1903-1905 
under the Radical ministry of M. Combes, a law 
was passed through the Chambers separating the 
Church from the State and putting an end to 
Bonaparte’s Concordat of 1802. Another law 
expelled from France all the contemplative orders 
and several active ones. Thus the Benedictines, 


266 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


for instance, who had done so much for what little 
intellectual activity and liturgical solemnity exists 
in the French Church paid the penalty for the 
“Liguers et moines d’affaires” who had disgraced 
their religion during the late affair. 

Leo XIII was spared the results of his concilia- 
tory attitude toward the French government. Dy- 
ing in 1903, he was succeeded by Cardinal Sarto, 
a man of humble origin and saintly life, who had 
been Patriarch of Venice and who became Pius X. 
Saints are occasionally more dangerous for the 
peace of the Church than are politicians. — 

In his noble simplicity, his ardor for Catholicism 
as a religious force and not merely as a system of 
ecclesiastical politics this Pope was truly excep- 
tional, and seems to belong to some more apostolic 
period of history than the era which Léon Daudet 
has named “the stupid nineteenth century.” The 
pronouncements of his predecessor had startled 
the world because of their clever political coloring; 
those of Pius & displeased the modern Catholic 
because they were intrinsically religious, and re- 
ligious, moreover, in the most supernatural sense. 
They were not a success. The one on the Commun- 
ion of children, ordaining that they first receive the 
Eucharist at the age of seven, caused a truculent 
flutter of actual disloyalty in France. There the 
curés and bishops had learned to trade on the day 


MODERNISM 267 


of the “first Communion” like so many janitors on 
the day of New Year’s. First Communion was pri- 
marily a social event for the adolescent, his family 
and his pastors, involving toilettes, presents, 
candles, cakes, and no end of ribbons and white 
icing. The Pope’s encyclical, which injured so 
much profitable commerce, was very ill received in 
a country where every grocery store atheist sends 
his children to the Sacraments twice in a lifetime 
because it is an expected social gesture. And the 
effect of the Pope’s moto proprio on the ignominy 
and reform of Church music has had an even more 
edifying history. This encyclical reads admirably 
on paper. There were to be no more comic opera 
tunes in the sanctuary, no more bellowing of ath- 
letic basses and female sopranos in a state of heat, 
no more blasphemies to Almighty God proffered 
through one of the chief of His arts. But if the 
reader wishes to know how the encyclical was loy- 
ally obeyed he has only to attend divine service in 
almost any Irish-American church of this country 
among a people which piques itself on its devotion 
to the cause of religion and the Holy Father. 
Pius X will be remembered as the pope who de- 
stroyed Modernism, especially in France. There 
the leader of the movement, in its rationalist as- 
pect, was the Abbé Loisy, professor of exegesis at 
the Catholic Institute at Paris. Strongly influenced 


268 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


by Loisy, a well-known prelate, Monsignor d’Hulst 
published in 1892 a sensible article in which he pro- 
posed to throw over the infallibility of the Old 
Testament in scientific and historical matters. Leo 
XIII, who was still reigning, was not the man to 
trouble the Church for the sake of the Old Testa- 
ment, and hence paid no attention either to Loisy 
or to Mgr. d’Hulst. His successor, however, felt in 
duty bound to crush the whole Modernist move- 
ment so far as encyclicals could do it. Loisy had 
just issued his Church and the Gospel, and a perusal 
of its devastating contents indicated that nothing 
from the Person of an historic Christ onward was 
safe from this most uncompromising of ecclesiasti- 
cal scholars. In the first chapter of this book, I 
have tried to indicate why the Modernists were, 
in my opinion, wrong even if the Pope were not al- 
together right. As for M. Loisy, he was excom- 
municated, and has continued to teach tranquilly, 
drawing large crowds to his lectures at the Collége 
de France. 

In condemning the movement which attempted 
to marry the Catholic faith to the fickle Goddess of 
Reason, the Church, it might be thought, would 
have wisely relied upon a philosophy of Catholicism 
based upon faith and faith alone. But such has 
not been the case. In 1834 Gregory XVI had 
condemned, with a zeal equal to that of Pius X, 
the so called ‘‘Fideist” philosophy of an Alsatian 


MODERNISM 269 


abbé, Baudain, according to which reason is power- 
less to establish truth, which may be apprehended 
by faith alone. Nothing could be more authenti- 
cally Catholic; indeed, Fideism is, stated in philo- 
sophic terms, the faith of the multitude, but it 
swore too much with the spirit of the nineteenth 
century, the age of Huxley and Matthew Arnold 
which had made‘a fetich of reason, and condemned 
it was. The fathers of the Vatican Council in 1870 
sustained the condemnation by pronouncing anath- 
ema upon him who said that a certain knowledge 
of God could not be obtained by reason alone. In 
Short, as Mr. Strachey observes, it became an ar- 
ticle of faith that faith is no longer necessary. 
Time may perhaps show that in condemning the 
generous human instinct upon which her whole sys- 
tem is based, the Church has shown herself impru- 
dent. Reinach has stated that historical criticism 
of origins has become such a positive science that 
the Fideists are wrong to dispense with it. Rei- 
nach is a great deal too sure. Historical criticism 
is, as yet, so little positive that it is powerless to 
prove so much as the existence of an historic 
Christ, let alone to disprove it. Historical criti- 
cism is similar to that other Goddess of Reason 
who was never the same two days in succession, 
who at first the wife of a professor, was replaced 
on the altar of Notre Dame by an actress. The 


270 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Church, in condemning the only possible philos- 
ophy of belief, and in continuing to coquette with 
the will-of-the-wisp called the human reason, might 
appear to be borrowing the chief weakness of the 
Modernism which she very rightly condemned, 


CHAPTER XXVI 
1914 


“SOON,” says a character in one of Compton 
Mackenzie’s novels, “‘will come a great war, and 
everybody will discover it has come either because 
people are Christians, or because they are not 
Christians. . . . The reason why the world is so 
critical of Christianity after nineteen hundred 
years is that they have expected it from the start 
to be a social panacea. God has only offered 
to the individual the opportunity to perfect him- 
Selfrals.” 

When the war came, it came without warning 
except for the relatively few on either side who 
worked for it and prepared it. For the great mass 
of people, who had the governments they deserved, 
it seemed like a cruel and incomprehensible over- 
throw of the universal worship of common sense 
without God which dominated the nineteenth cen- 
tury. The war was unchained, as everyone knows, 
by a great Catholic prince, His Apostolic Majesty, 
Francis Joseph of Austria. Apart from this acci- 
dent, it had no real religious ramifications. Catho- 


lic Austria was allied to Protestant Germany, and 
271 


272 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


to the Ottoman Empire, which was not even Chris- 
tian. Atheist France, as her enemies liked to call 
her, was joined with Protestant England and with 
Russia, still dominated by the decadent Orthodox 
Church. Pius X made one desperate attempt to 
avert the struggle through an appeal to Francis 
Joseph, but his nuncio at Vienna was not even ad- 
mitted to that cretinous old despot. Then hav- 
ing witnessed the violation of Belgium and the 
first raid on Paris by the German army the Pope 
died and was gathered to his fathers. 

His successor, Benedict XV, immediately buried 
himself in an impenetrable neutrality. Under the 
circumstances it is difficult to see what else he could 
have done. The only way he could have stopped 
the war, or at any rate demoralized it, was to have 
commanded all Catholics on either side to lay 
down their arms, and the modern Papacy is not 
quite courageous enough for that. Besides, the 
Papacy has never been officially “pacifist”; it has 
indulged in too many minor wars of its own to 
takesoevangelicastand. The Popecontented him- 
self with the relief of prisoners, of the deported, 
etc., but he made no public pronouncement upon 
the greatest moral disaster of modern times, until 
the winter of 1916 when he unexpectedly for- 
warded proposals of peace to that other alleged 
“pontiff of humanity,” the late President Wilson. 
The latter, who was on the eve of launching his 


1914 273 


own nation upon the sea of blood, politely re- 
jected the proposals, and thereafter the Pope pre- 
served a profound and prudent silence. The poor 
man was severely criticized, as it was, especially by 
adherents of the Entente, first for keeping silent, 
and then for having spoken in favor of religion and 
reason. Even Protestants passionately and quite 
illogically adjured him to act as umpire always on 
the condition that he referee on their side. Bene- 
dict XV was, to all appearances, a suave and 
kindly personage, but scarcely any pope, above all 
one reigning in such a crisis, has bequeathed of him- 
self so negative an impression. 

It should have been evident to anyone that 
Christianity, in any comprehensible sense of the 
word, had nothing to do with the war, and that 
those on the side of the Entente who posed as 
paladins of civilization and the heritage of the 
Middle Ages against a pagan barbarism were 
either carried away by martial hysteria or were 
simply hypocrites. All authentic Christianity had 
been superseded by a very different passion—-that 
of nationalism or patriotism. ‘The earth was a 
babel of clamoring churches, all calling upon the 
one true God, and adjuring their adherents to kill 
as many of the enemy as possible in His name. As 
for the heavens they were silent. No one actually 
knows, for instance, what Christ taught upon the 
question of war. What he indubitably said was: 


274 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


“Love one another.” If the quintessence of love 
lies in slaying, blinding, disemboweling one’s polit- 
ical enemies, then one can still be a Christian and 
wage war. If not...? The infallible pope 
might well have pronounced upon this particular 
matter of faith and morals, but he refrained. 

What is evident is that the more obviously na- 
tional or Protestant churches made, in the per- 
son of many notable representatives, obscene spec- 
tacles of themselves from 1914 to 1918, sparing 
no effort, on either continent, to render their reli- 
gion as detestable as possible to an already skepti- 
cal generation. If Christianity, as a whole, has 
not been infinitely discredited as a result of the 
world war it is not the fault of the churches. That 
of Rome which “blew neither hot nor cold,” has, 
on the whole come out of the torment best, for the 
sin of Laodicea is not in the same category with 
the sin of Judas. 

After all, it is too early to write with any degree 
of justice about the war. To do that one must 
have acquired a philosophy. Until then one re- 
mains in the unfortunate position of the Church 
which, upon this point, had not yet made up its 
mind, 


CHAPTER XXVII 
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN AMERICA 


DurING the seventeenth century, Jesuit and 
Franciscan missions operated in Lower California 
and along the Great Lakes. But the first Catholic 
adventure in the New World organized by Eng- 
lishmen was Maryland, planned by Sir George 
Calvert, first Lord Baltimore, and executed by 
his son, Cecil, the second lord. In 1634 they 
chartered from Charles I a vast estate lying south 
of the Potomac to its mouth, and established there 
a small settlement, which they named Saint Mary’s 
in honor of the Blessed Virgin. The object of the 
colony was to establish, at a prudent distance from 
Puritan New England, and in the most temperate 
and delightful zone of climate along the seaboard, 
a place where Catholics could dwell in peace from 
any reénforcement of the penal laws which might 
threaten them at home. Malignant persecution 
had taught the followers of Lord Baltimore the 
beauty of tolerance; accordingly, religious tolera- 
tion for all Christians was one of the foundation- 
stones of the colony. ‘Baltimore,’ says Bancroft, 


“was the first to make religious freedom the basis 
275 


276 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


of the State.” The province of Maryland in those 
early days must have enframed an Arcadian exist- 
ence for men of good will, environed as it was by 
an impenetrable morass of militant Calvinism 
and boundless savagery. Catholics cannot but 
think with tenderness of that simplified and pure 
existence before the arrival of the industrial revo- 
lution, together with factories, teeming towns, 
commercial strife, noise and all the other beauties 
of modern civilization. It was at once a copy and 
an improvement of the old, merry, pre-Reforma- 
tion England. Once more in an English-speaking 
land, the burning lights of the old Church streamed 
out upon the primeval night on the great festivals 
of the Christian year; and once again the Angelus 
sounded shyly at the head of the little harbor, and 
was heard far out upon the bluish waters. Their 
unhappy coreligionists in England, plagued by 
Puritan revolution, Puritan rule, Popish panics 
and no-Popery riots, must have poignantly envied 
the Maryland Catholics in their patrimony— 
Deeper than any yearnings after thee 
Seemed those far-rolling, westward-smiling seas. 
The American Revolution, separating the colo- 
nial churches abruptly from the foundations in 
the old country, produced the American Catholic 
hierarchy. In order to cause the American Cath- 
olics no embarrassment in their relations with the 
new government, the Holy See at once appointed 


CATHOLIC CHURCH IN AMERICA 277 


the Reverend John Carroll of Maryland head of 
the community in the United States, first as pre- 
fect apostolic, then as Archbishop of Maryland, 
the first metropolitan See. In 1820, there were 
only 244,500 Catholics in these States; in 1906, 
there were 12,079,142. The main source of this 
enormous growth was emigration from Ireland, 
Germany, Canada, Bohemia and Poland. Racial, 
as much as religious, reasons produced the most 
organized opposition to Catholicism shortly before 
the Civil War in the ephemeral “Know Nothing” 
party, which, in this particular aspect, may be re- 
garded as the ancestor of the Ku-Klux-Klan. The 
Papacy, ever since 1892, has had an official repre- 
sentative at Washington called the Apostolic 
Delegate, usually with the rank of archbishop. 
The late Cardinal Gibbons was correct in stat- 
ing that American Catholicism has never produced 
any important heresies or schisms; it did, however, 
furnish one original movement which was suffi- 
ciently important to be condemned mildly at 
Rome. This was the movement called ‘“Amer- 
icanism,” “a characteristic glorification of good 
works, somewhat at the expense of faith,” as well 
as a reaction against too exclusively foreign influ- 
ences in the American Church. Certain French 
clerics, with their customary talent for get- 
ting the world into trouble, called pontifical 
attention to ““Americanism” and the doings of the 


278 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


“Vankee Church” in general, and arbitrarily con- 
nected with them the name of one, Father Hecker, 
an American priest, well known in France. I recall 
the title of one of these anti-American tracts, writ- 
ten with true Gallic gall: Father Hecker: Should 
he be called a Saini? 

Isaac Thomas Hecker was of German origin, 
and had originally been connected with the famous 
Brook Farm colony at Concord, Massachusetts, 
which numbered among its associates Thoreau, 
Bronson Alcott, and for a time, Emerson. Unable 
to find any ultimate consolation in the mysteries 
of New England transcendentalism, Hecker be- 
came a Catholic, and entered the Redemptorist 
Order, founded in the eighteenth century by Saint 
Alphonsus Liguori. His dream was the conver- 
sion of his adopted country, by American methods, 
by priests imbued with the American spirit, and 
unable to effect this dream among the Redemptor- 
ists who were then largely German, he left them 
and founded, with papal permission, the Congre- 
gation of Saint Paul the Apostle, popularly known 
as the Paulist Fathers. With the aid of the best 
ecclesiastical architects he could find at that date 
he erected an imposing church in what was then 
the hinterland of New York City, above “Hell’s 
Kitchen,” near the Hudson waterfront. 

The missionary foundations of the new Order 
spread from ocean to ocean. Their object was two- 


CATHOLIC CHURCH IN AMERICA 279 


fold: the conversion of non-Catholic America by 
the golden arts of persuasion and example, and 
the reform of public devotion and Church music. 
Protestants have always vaguely respected and 
often envied the liturgical splendors of the Cath- 
olic Church at its best; hence the Paulists were 
wise even from the proselyting standpoint, to con- 
centrate upon producing that best in their public 
ceremonies. It is certain that many people, Catho- 
lic and non-Catholic, recall regretfully the great 
days at the New York church under the late Su- 
perior General, Father Hughes, with their noble 
services and unadulterated chant. Sic transit 
Bloria. .° oe." 

During the ugly period of reaction which suc- 
ceeded the war, we began to hear about the 
Ku-Klux-Klan, formed to defend American institu- 
tions against alien influences, by which its organ- 
izers largely meant Catholic ones. It is difficult to 
say why one should take seriously an organization 
bearing such a name, let alone such insignia. 
That many American Catholics have so taken it, 
is only another proof of the formidable absence of 
humor which afflicts the Kelt wherever his religion 
is concerned. Do these people really imagine that 
a divinely founded religion nineteen centuries old, 
the one faith of the west for fourteen hundred 


* See the article on the Paulist church of New York by Wilfred 
Anthony in Christian Art, June, 1908. 


280 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


years, the proud, everlasting Church of countless 
confessors, apostles, martyrs and holy kings, can 
be shaken a hair’s breadth by the grotesque agi- 
tation of a parcel of yokels, rigged out in false 
noses and bed quilts, and calling themselves 
Kleagles and Grand Dragons? The Klan would 
not even merit mention in a serious history were 
it not that its adherents claim to be defending 
certain vague American liberties against the 
Roman menace, whatever that means. No one be- 
lieves less in clerical interference with liberty than 
the writer, but one finds that when “the Roman 
menace” concerns itself with an economic liberty, 
like birth control, which is none of its business, 
or with the liberty of literature, which is still less, 
there is no complaint from the Klan or from any 
other Protestants of similar mentality? It is only 
when Catholics manifest the tendency to educate 
their children in Catholic schools that the Klan 
emits a loud shriek, followed by cacklings ad 
nauseum about the sacredness of American insti- 
tutions and the American dislike of a sacerdotal 
religion, as if the American’s opinion mattered 
tuppence on such a point. Now if there is one 
liberty which may be considered American, and 
even fundamental, it is the right of parents to edu- 
cate their children as they see fit. We are not a 
country so commodious as Sparta or so rash as 
Russia that we can venture to take education clean 


CATHOLIC CHURCH IN AMERICA 281 


out of family hands. We have neither the space, 
nor the equipment, nor above all the mentality, to 
make such an experiment anything but a vast dis- 
aster. If rich people have the right to send their 
children to costly and useless schools where they 
learn nothing but sports and social tone, poor 
Catholics have a still more incontestable right to 
send their boys and girls to places where they learn 
something about God and His Truth. 

Certain American Catholics try to vindicate 
their political loyalty which is more than excellent 
by an over-emphasis which sounds false and is usu- 
ally unbecoming. There is no sense in being more 
patriotic than the pope himself. There is no sense 
in adopting upon a subject like war, for instance, a 
language which would have revolted Julius II and 
disgraced the Kaiser’s chaplains. Hark, for in- 
stance, to the Rt. Rev. Thomas F. Duggan, Vicar- 
General of the Diocese of Hartford, Connecticut: 

“War is not un-Christian. Sometimes it is a 
Christian duty laid upon us by God and man. It 
is imposed upon us by the Lord, who is the Author 
of human society, and by man who is the inter- 
preter of the divine Will... .” 

So ‘‘man” in the person of the Kaiser, the Tsar, 
the Emperor Francis Joseph, ex-President Poin- 
care and the late Mr. Wilson, is the interpreter of 
the divine Will, and dissidents from this idea, 
which would have shocked Luther, are charitably 


282 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


invited by Mgr. Duggan to betake themselves to 
the nearest federal cell! The expression of this 
rank Protestantism in the past, would, it is to be 
feared, have delivered Mgr. Duggan, not to a fed- 
eral cell, but to the tender mercies of the Inquisi- 
tion which had a short way with sycophants. His 
proper place, after all, is neither in a federal cell 
nor in a heretic prison, and, above all, not in the 
violet robe of a superior priest; his proper place is 
in the Ku-Klux-Klan. Where a Church is in 
decadence, there are the Kleagles gathered to- 
gether, inside and out. When a representative of 
the Catholic Church finds it necessary to beslaver 
the civil government, and profane the name of God 
in doing so, one can begin to measure the distance 
between our time and the true Catholic age when 
the Church withstood the civil power, and some- 
times vanquished it, and always despised it. 

And then there is something else. Is it the 
complex sense of inferiority brought on by a long 
misunderstanding and stupid hostility; is it the 
“nersecution-mania” inherent in a nation like the 
Irish, subjected to centuries of injustice, which 
renders the average American Catholic so self-con- 
sciously anxious to disassociate himself from every- 
thing frowned on by hypocrites and smut-hounds? 
Take the present crusade for “purity” in books 
and the theater, for instance. What in the names 
of Chaucer and Rabelais do American Catholics 


CATHOLIC CHURCH IN AMERICA 283 


expect to gain by identifying themselves with 
Censorship, White Lists and all the other current 
imbecilities in this field? We all know what a 
really good ‘‘Catholic” book is. It is something 
one wouldn’t give a dog to worry, let alone a sen- 
sible child to read. And the Dramatic Editor of 
the Commonweal pontificates in his column week 
after week, with the result that when a current 
play has the slightest pretension to artistic merit, 
it fails to pass Mr. Skinner’s inspection on the 
ground that it would not be nice for his youngest 
daughter (aet. 6), and that when a play is com- 
pletely and abysmally idiotic, it is always guaran- 
teed “clean,” whatever that means to a Catholic 
journalist’s peculiar mind. Now I take Mr. 
Skinner’s smugness to be very characteristic of the 
Church in this country in questions of literature 
and art. In a reaction from the perilous freedoms 
of the past, which is half Irish, half puritan and 
wholly uneducated, it is, at present, in the throes 
of eunuch worship so far as these questions are 
concerned. And I will allow myself to call the 
attention of the adorers of impotence to the fact 
that, in its age of health, the Church patronized 
and protected every virile manifestation of art, 
even when the latter bordered on what Mr. Skinner 
would call the “unclean.”” Chaucer, who was a 
great Catholic poet, composed lines and situations 
which could not be recited or reproduced upon any 


284 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


American stage at the present time. Rabelais, who 
has given his name to a certain type of literature, 
was no Huguenot, let alone free-thinker; he was 
a priest of the Catholic Church who said his Mass, 
no doubt with piety, in his parish church at 
Meudon. Even Petronius, they tell us, may have 
been a canonized bishop of Bologna. Beccadelli, 
whose adaptations of classic facetie would drive 
a modern prelate with shame and sorrow to the 
grave, dedicated them to a cardinal. ‘“Afneus 
Silvius” wrote indecent comedies; he was also a 
Pope, one of the better popes. In short, there was 
a time when Catholic churchmen were also men. 
I prefer not to say what a lot of them are now. 
But in conclusion I will quote a sentence of a 
Catholic writer, Louis Bertrand, author of a life of 
Saint Augustin, which effectively sums up the pres- 
ent American Catholic attitude toward the arts: 

“T claim, without any compromise, the honor of 
being a Catholic, but it enrages me to see that 
under the cover of Catholicism, a silly prudery is 
imposing upon us a literature for namby-pamby 
little girls, an art without beauty, without man- 
hood and without sincerity.” 

I have stated what I believe to be a fact, that in 
the arts the modern Catholic is largely non-pro- 
ductive, and the reason why he is non-productive 
is that his attitude toward the arts is one of timid- 


CATHOLIC CHURCH IN AMERICA 285 


ity and obscurantism. It would be interesting to 
analyze the reason for this condition. 

The principal reason may be sought in the edu- 
cation given to Catholics when they are children, 
and the lessons of self-effacement inflicted upon 
them when they are men. All this produces a con- 
sciousness of inferiority, and a half-conscious in- 
feriority is soon developed into a real one. 

“You shall not read so-and-so,” says the priest 
in the pulpit, or the fancy Catholic in his little 
review,” he is dangerous. Avoid art galleries; they 
are filled with nudities. Don’t follow this or that 
scientific course; you will lose your faith. You 
shall not exert your intelligence in politics; you 
will be considered a bad American. You shall not. 
mony Olt Sallanote try xs 

Fear, inferiority, impotence. 

As Huysmans once said, if this system is of a 
surety insufficient to produce saints, it provides, 
at any rate, a very fair manufactory of tame 
geese. 

The only trouble with the Catholic Church in 
this country is that it is rather nervously attempt- 
ing to be a department of the American Defense 
Society or the Purity League. No one can read its 
history without realizing that its true function in 
this world is something very different. It is an 
international and everlasting Church, lifted high 
above our little systems and pruderies, com- 


286 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


pounded of cackle and conceit. And the tempta- 
tion is strong to say to all these good people: 

“Vou will long outlive the ‘Americanism’ of 
flag flapping and boob-tickling and all the other 
contemporary Babbitries. At present, you are 
being assailed by something which cannot be dig- 
nified by the name of intolerance, since it is merely 
congenital imbecility waving a large American 
flag. Don’t play its game or practice its methods. 
Cultivate the deep Christian gayety of the ages 
which is called a sense‘of humor. Don’t be bump- 
tious about your religion; be proud of it, which 
is very different, for one of the fruits of love is a 
golden silence, and silence is the one unbearable 
retort to fools.” 


UNTO THIS LAST 


AND now what does it all mean? And why have 
written, as objectively as possible, with more than 
enough of what is called the critical spirit, the his- 
tory of a church, of the Church? 

Bernard Shaw was severely taken to task for tag- 
ging his fine play about Joan of Arc with an epi- 
logue, but an enlightened rereading of the epilogue 
will convince one that he was justified in writing 
one, and so, I trust, am I. I am concluding this 
book on the eve of Christmas, the Christian birth- 
day, and no reasonable person will object, if in a 
book on Christianity there appear finally a little 
Christian propaganda. Like Botticelli, who painted 
a great picture introducing at the knees of the 
Divine Infant a long concourse of shepherds, 
saints, noble gentlemen and by-gone kings, I can- 
not resist painting in a little of myself in the corner 
of the canvas. 

For I have tried, up to this point, to make my 
book simply a picture, or rather a series of pic- 
tures; to give away their whole case to the agnos- 
tics from the start; to employ all their pet weapons 


against myself; to state at the outset that the 
287 


288 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Church exhibits all the scars of human imperfec- 
tions, violences and compromises; that Christ for 
whose sake the Church exists cannot be proved 
even to have lived historically; that nothing can 
be proved; that the basic axiom of all religion is 
faith, and nothing but faith. 

Faith is only one panel in the triptych of the 
evangelic virtues; the others are love and hope, and 
the greatest of these is love. Without it there is 
no happiness in this world, or the next. Happiness 
is still as much the staple of what is to be de- 
sired as it was in the days of Plato and Epicurus. 
When we were young we did not consciously feel it 
to be so; it was our natural element, like the air. 
Family life, friendship, physical love, the zest for 
existence itself, were so many delightful avenues 
by which the soul went out to encounter its future. 
But time passed; the days drew in about the soul, 
and presently one became conscious that the admir- 
able pleasures of this world were not enough; and 
at last the whole being experienced, like a wound, 
like a new and mysterious malady, the pang of 
that disinheritance for which there is no name, 
that loneliness in the midst of a multitude. There 
was no recourse for the spirit in men and things 
because the spirit was without love. Nothing is 
easier than to feel this abomination of desolation 
planing over scenes even of the most intense rev- 


elry:— 


UNTO THIS LAST 289 


And ah to know not while with friends I sit, 
And while the purple joy is passed about, 
Whether ’tis ampler day divinelier lit, 
Or homeless night without. — 


I can recall a “pagan” rout years ago in New 
York City on Christmas Eve. Under galleries 
groaning with the wit, the beauty and the intelli- 
gence of Bohemia, whirled people in various stages 
of alcoholic felicity, in the most fantastic and out- 
rageous disguises imaginable, dancing, drinking, 
making love, half-secreted from the fires of the 
electricity and the eyes of the policemen. These 
people seemed to represent the aggregate of what 
America has contributed to the science of the good 
life. Yet they were not witty nor good to look 
on, nor certainly happy. As ‘‘the purple joy” was 
more and more passed about, so were the uglier 
women. Then a little Jew, dressed in a brown 
gabardine and crowned with paper thorns, mounted 
a platform and waved over the howling concourse 
a large cardboard cross. “I am the Light of the 
World,” he cried. . . . I left the hall and went up- 
town. The air was exquisitely thin and cold; the 
sky so overjeweled with stars that they seemed to 
create a special radiance, a supernatural light over 
the sleeping city. Near the river, the great church 
of the Paulist Fathers stood open in the night, a 
shout of treble beauty coming through its doors, 


290 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


and inside all sweet and garnished, illustrious with 
lights, expectant of the coming Guest. The long 
shining procession advanced up the aisle, odorous 
with incense and balsam, the little choristers, chil- 
dren of the street, were momentarily silent while 
the men responded in the old carol: 


God rest you, gentle children, 
May nothing you affright ; 

For Jesus Christ, our Saviour 
Was born on Christmas night! 


As the Mass proceeded, its every motion, its every 
phrase seemed to illuminate the obscure distress in 
which we are bound to be plunged when we try 
to live without God, without love. “Renew thy- 
self,’ cried the children’s voices in the Introit, 
“Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee. 
Why have the heathen raged together, and the 
people invented inanity? ...” After the exulta- 
tion of the Gloria when, in a storm of bells and 
organs, the full choir proclaimed peace to men of 
good will, the priest prayed aloud: 


O, God who didst make this most sa- 
cred night to shine forth with the glory 
of Him Who ts the Light of the World, 
grant that he who thus revealed to us has 
made splendid our path on earth, may be 
forever our joy and our light in heaven. 


UNTO THIS LAST 291 


Then he took bread and wine, fruits of the kindly 
earth, and having blessed them he said: 


Because by the mystery of God made 
flesh, a new light hath risen from Thy 
Brightness to shine in the eyes of our 
souls, in order that God being visible, 
we may be borne upward to the love of 
things invisible, therefore with angels 
and archangels, with Thrones and Dom- 
inations, with all the array of the heav- 
enly Host, we sing:— 


All the choir, men, adolescents, boys, children, 
cried out the resurgent chorus of the Sanctus, and 
before its last echo had perished a bell pealed, and 
the whole assembly, the people in the dim nave, 
the white-robed choristers, the glistening minis- 
trants fell on their knees, and in the breathless si- 
lence, Christ was once more born upon the altar. 

It is for Him that men have reared that incom- 
parable fabric of worship which speaks to the 
senses as no other has ever done. It is for Him 
that His Church has founded that art which, in 
default of dates and documents, and often even 
of sanctity, is her living proof. It is for Him that 
she has invented those chants which by their bal- 
samic power, their inalienable beauty, disinfect the 
soul. It is by His virtue that all things good and 


292 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


beautiful exist and have their being—bread and 
wine, burning wax and golden flame, the pure and 
virile smell of pine and fir, the flowerlike faces of 
children, the soaring of their voices, purity, ma- 
ternity, brotherhood. . . . And it is not enough 
that He dwell apart in the absolute of His Per- 
fection, in the incommensurable splendor of His 
infinity. Love begets love, and He must come 
down into the city which has forgotten Him and 
enter into bodies eaten up by the follies and the 
sorrows of life, and be present in souls bankrupt of 
all grace. 

And even this is not enough. In the ghastly 
hour when all men have abandoned Him, even his 
priests; when they have set up obscene and cruel 
deities in His place, labeled patriotism and coun- 
try; when all have fled from the accursed frontiers 
riddled by gas and shell; when boys and men, sac- 
rificed by their vile rulers are thrown up on the 
hopeless plain like so much fodder for death; when 
all men have deserted us, He is still there. By 
the hands of a few faithful priests, expiating in 
their persons the crime of their Church and His, he 
comes again upon dismantled altars in ruined 
churches; He enters once again into young bodies 
wasted by sin and shaken by fear; He accompa- 
nies them even to the last trench; His sweet and 
everlasting accent penetrates the scream of shells 
saying: “Lo, I am with you alway even to the 


UNTO THIS LAST 293 


- consummation of time”; and He illumines even 
the shadow of dissolution with an incomparable 
hope. 

What other religion dares to make such an affir- 
mation? What can “justification by faith” or a 
few consoling words from an army chaplain do to 
speed a poor dying boy in such a moment beside 
the priest who brings him his God? In vain they 
have revolted and apostasized, misled by Catholic 
abuses, or by their own conceits, falling away like 
the Jews in the Gospel who murmured: “How can 
this Man give us His Flesh to eat?” and from that 
time walked no more with Him. And the end of 
it all is one great apostasy, one vast rejection, not 
of this mystery or that dogma, but of Christ Him- 
self, and not all the model settlements and Young 
Men’s Christian Associations in these States will 
restore him; only our faith, the faith of our 
fathers. But I do not wish to end on any note of 
disparagement for others of good will who call and 
believe themselves Christians. They follow their 
own lights, and one bad Catholic is worse than ten 
just men who need no repentance, for he follows 
a supernatural light, and his aid is greater than 
theirs. This book began with Jesus, and must 
end with Him. He is alpha and omega, the begin- 
ning and the end, the first and the last. Like the 
mother of Francois Villon in the ballad we know 
nothing but this, ‘“‘and in this faith, we wish to live 


294. STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


and die.” He can do nothing for those who say 
“they have need of nothing, and know not that 
they are wretched and miserable and blind and 
naked.” It is rather with the poor and unpreten- 
tious and disinherited of life that He delighted 
Himself when He was with us in the world; and 
perhaps also with him who desires to believe, who 
sees far off the heavenly lights of the Church to 
which he may never attain, who after all his wan- 
derings has not yet reached home. 


EXPLICIT 


APPENDIX: ON THE LITURGY 


THE Liturgy is the collective name given to the 
ceremonies of the Catholic Church. There is 
only one standard liturgy, that of Rome, but the 
Holy See allows large variations from this stand- 
ard in the case of Oriental and Uniat Churches, 
the Grzco-Melchites, Maronites, etc. The advan- 
tage of a single rite, expressed in a universal lan- 
guage like Latin, is that any Catholic may find 
the exact worship to which he is accustomed, even 
if he travel in an eastward direction from Man- 
hattan to Japan. The text of the Liturgy is found 
principally in two official prayer-books, the Missal, 
containing the order of the Mass with its varia- 
tions throughout the year, and the Breviary, con- 
taining the other services, and of these last, only 
Vespers in the late afternoon and Compline at 
night are, as a rule, publicly performed in the 
ordinary church. 

Of all these services the Mass is, obviously, the 
central one, since it is the only rite instituted by 
Christ, and it enframes the miracle by which bread 


and wine become the elements of His Body and 
295 


296 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Blood. It is celebrated once each day before 
noon by a priest, fasting and in special vestments, 
before an altar adorned with a crucifix and lighted 
by two tapers (six at a high mass) but never 
more. A low Mass in one said. A high, or solemn 
mass is one chanted to the accompaniment of music 
and special ceremonial. A pontifical mass is one 
said or chanted by a bishop. A requiem mass is 
one said or sung before a burial or on an anni- 
versary for the repose of asoul. A requiem is often 
terminated by the ‘‘Absolution” in which the priest, 
vested in a black cope, sprinkles the catafalque 
with holy water and censes it, the action being fol- 
lowed by certain chants and prayers. 

Since the solemn form of the Mass is, usually, 
the only one that concerns the non-Catholic spec- 
tator, we may describe it as being formed on six 
principal parts. It begins with the singing by the 
choir of three chants, the Introit, the Kyrie and 
the Gloria, followed by (2) the Prayer of the 
Sunday or Festival, the reading from one of Saint 
Paul’s Epistles, and the ceremonial chanting of a 
passage from the Gospels, accompanied by incense 
and lights, (3) the chanting of the Nicene Creed 
by the choir, (4) the Offertory in which the bread 
and wine are brought up to the altar and the latter 
is perfumed with incense in preparation for their 
consecration, (5) the Canon, or Consecration, of 


APPENDIX: ON THE LITURGY 297 


these elements which is the climax of the rite, sig- 
nified to the assistants by the elevation of the 
Host and Chalice and the ringing of a bell. The 
Canon terminates in the Lord’s Prayer, the Kiss 
of Peace and the Communion of priest and people, 
that is, their reception of the consecrated Bread 
and Wine. In the Roman Church the Host alone 
is administered to the people. Sixth, and last, 
there is the conclusion of the rite, consisting of 
another prayer called the Post-Communion, the 
Dismissal and a benediction from the priest at the 
altar. 

This extremely simple and impressive act of 
worship differs utterly by its sacrificial and sacra- 
mental character from the services of the various 
Protestant sects, but Episcopalians, at least, 
should have no difficulty in following intelligently 
a ceremony so very similar to their own Com- 
munion Service. Thanks to the liturgical tact of 
the English reformers, the Anglican rite of Com- 
munion is a partial adaptation of the Roman 
Mass. 

In the Catholic Church, the liturgical year, be- 
ginning with Advent in December, is varied 
throughout by the occurrence of certain com- 
memorative festivals and holydays, ranged in 
different degrees of importance: (1) Feasts of our 
Lord, such ag Christmas, the Circumcision, Easter, 
Corpus Christi, the Sacred Heart, (2) of our Lady, 


298 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


like Candlemas, the Annunciation, the Assumption, 
the Rosary, (3) of Apostles, Martyrs and Con- 
fessors of the Church. The colors of vestments, 
hangings, etc., vary symbolically with these sea- 
sons and days, white signifying a feast of our 
Lord or our Lady, red that of a martyr, violet the 
two penitential seasons of Advent and Lent, and 
green the days of midsummer and early autumn 
dedicated to the Trinity with which the Church 
year comes to a close. 

For the various psalms, chants, canticles and 
hymns employed in the Mass or the Divine Office, 
the Church has provided a magnificent fund of 
melodies, called collectively Gregorian Chant from 
the name of Saint Gregory the Great (590-604) 
the Pope believed to have first edited them. The 
authorship of these melodies is quite unknown; 
“the true composer of plain chant,” said Huys- 
mans in a burst of enthusiasm, “‘is God, the Holy 
Spirit.” Modern settings to the chants proscribed 
for the Liturgy are, however, permitted by the 
Holy See so long as they are sufficiently devotional 
in character. An encyclical of the late Pius X laid 
down the rules governing composition for the 
sanctuary on the part of modern musicians. It 
must respect the text, and refrain from using it 
as a peg on which to hang musical inventions full 
of impertinent devices borrowed from the theater 


APPENDIX: ON THE LITURGY 299 


and concert hall. Among composers who have 
written for the Church in more or less the requisite 
spirit are Palestrina and his school, Arcadelt, 
César Franck, Gounod, Elgar, and others too 
numerous to mention.* 


* Probably the two best prayer-books for the Catholic layman or 
the non-Catholic church-goer are The Roman Missal and The Day 
Hours of the Church, both edited by the Benedictine nuns of Stan- 
brook in Worcestershire (New York, P. J. Kenedy and Sons). 





GLOSSARY OF ECCLESIASTICAL TERMS 


AxBBESS: The superior of a community of nuns. Next in 
rank comes the Prioress. 

Axssot: The superior of a community of men. The Prior 
comes next in rank. 

ADVENT: Opening period of the Christian year, including 
the four Sundays before Christmas. 

ANGELS: Spiritual beings created by God in an ordered 
hierarchy. 

ANGLICANISM: The religion of the Episcopal Church of 
England since its final secession from the Papal au- 
thority in 1559. In the United States it is called the 
Protestant Episcopal Church. 

APOSTLES’ CREED (Roman Symbol): The earliest and most 
accepted statement of Christian belief. 

Apostotic DrLEecATE: The Pope’s representative in the 
United States. 

AposToLtic Succession: The unbroken continuity in the 
powers of bishops and priests inherited from the 
Apostles through the Sacrament of Orders. 

ARCHBISHOP (Metropolitan): The difference between a 
bishop and an archbishop is purely administrative. 
His field of jurisdiction contains several bishoprics 
and corresponds to the Roman province. 

AssumPTIon: A belief that the Virgin Mother of Christ on 
her death was at once transported or “assumed” into 
eternal life with God. The 15th of August is the 
festival commemorating this event. 

301 


302 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Baptism: The Sacrament of initiation into the Church by 
means of water purifying from original sin. 

BENEDICTINES: The oldest surviving order of monks in 
the Church, founded by St. Benedict about 529. It 
reformed itself several times under the names of 
Cluniac, Cistercian and Trappist. The official name is 
the Order of St. Benedict (O.S.B.). 

BENEDICTION: A brief devotion in which the Host, or con- 
secrated Bread, is enshrined for adoration and then 
lifted in a sign of the cross over the people, signifying 
that Christ Himself in a sacramental form is blessing 
them. 

BisHop: The highest spiritual entity in the Catholic eccle- 
siastical system except the Pope, who himself is Bishop 
of Rome. The sacramental powers of a bishop are to 
consecrate other bishops, ordain priests and confirm 
children. His field of jurisdiction is the see or diocese, 
originally coterminous with a Roman district. 


CatipH: The successor of Mohammed and head of the 
Mohammedan Church. His capital was originally 
Bagdad on the Tigris in Mesopotamia and his political 
powers were shared by two other Moslem princes, the 
Sultan of Egypt and the Emir of Cordoba in Spain. 

CALVINISM: The second flight of sixteenth century Prot- 
estantism. A system of doctrine and church govern- 
ment first formulated by Calvin, which had different 
names in different countries. Thus in England, Scot- 
land and America it was Presbyterian, in France 
Huguenot, in Holland and Germany, Reformed, etc. 

Canon: (1) The Prayer of Consecration in the Mass, (2) a 
piece of Church legislation, (3) one of a group of 
priests connected with a cathedral. 


GLOSSARY OF ECCLESIASTICAL TERMS 303 


CanonicAt Hours (Divine Office): A set of eight short 
services to be said daily by all priests and corporately 
in monastic houses. They are in their order Matins, 
Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline, 

CANONIZATION: The papal act of declaring a saint. 

CARDINAL: Originally the pastor of one of the primitive 
churches of Rome, now appointed by the Pope to be 
a member of his executive. The title, though the high- 
est papal honor obtainable, is purely administrative and 
does not imply any spiritual superiority to other 
bishops. 

CATHEDRAL: The principal church of a diocese where the 
bishop has his cathedra or chair. 

CuHapTer: Collective name for the clergy of a cathedral or 
the members of a monastic house. 

CoMMUNION: The act of receiving the consecrated Bread 
and Wine in the Mass. 

CONFIRMATION: The Sacrament conferred by a bishop to 
strengthen the profession of the Faith. 

Corpus Curisti: The Thursday after Trinity Sunday kept 
as a solemn festival in honor of the Blessed Sacrament. 

CouNTER-REFORM (Catholic Reaction): The movement 
among Catholics commencing with the Council of Trent 
(ended 1563) to combat Protestantism by an increased 
energy and austerity in the Catholic Church itself. 

Curia: The whole college of cardinals composing the papal 
court. 


Dark Acrs: A period of European history dating from the 
break-up of the Roman Empire by the barbarian in- 
vasions and ending with the emergence in the eleventh 
century of the new energies and culture called medieval. 

Deacon: The lowest among the three major orders in the 
Church. 


3804 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


DEAN (Provost): The head or rector of the cathedral clergy 
or canons under the bishop. In the United States, 
the Vicar-General. 

Dominicans: An order of preaching friars founded in the 
thirteenth century by St. Dominic to combat heresy by 
education and good example. ‘Their official name is 
Order of Preachers (O.P.). 


EASTER: The Sunday following the full moon of the March 
equinox and the festival celebrating the resurrection 
of Christ. It is in a sense parallel to the Pasch or 
Passover of the Jews. 

EcuMENICAL Councit: A general council of the Church 
held usually to terminate some crisis or to determine 
a dogma. The first was that of Nicea in 325, the last 
was the Vatican Council in 1870. 

EPIscopATE: Collective name for the bishops of the Cath- 
olic Church. 

Eucuarist: The Real Presence of Christ in the consecrated 
elements of Bread and Wine. 


Franciscans: An order of friars founded by St. Francis of 
Assisi in 1209 to bring the Gospel to the poor and 
afflicted. Its official name is the Order of Friars Minor 
(O.F.M.) and the Capuchin Fathers are an offshoot. 


GALLICANISM: Name given to the ruling temper of the 
Catholic Church in France during the seventeenth 
century which posed as semi-independent of the Pope’s 
authority. 

Gotuic: Name given to a style of architecture which super- 
seded the Romanesque, is distinguished by the pointed 
arch and is seen at its best in the thirteenth century 
cathedrals of France and England. 


GLOSSARY OF ECCLESIASTICAL TERMS 305 


Grace: The regenerating influence or endowment communi- 
cated to the soul by God. 

GuEetpH: A member of the medieval faction which sup- 
ported the temporal power of the Popes in the Italian 
peninsula as opposed to that of the Holy Roman or 
German Emperors. Ghibelline was the name of the 
imperial party. 


HEAVEN: The place or condition of eternal reunion with 
God. 

Hetty: The place or condition of souls which of their free 
will have rejected God. 

Heresy: The rejection of one or more of Catholic truths 
as revealed by Christ to the Apostolic Church. 

HicH CHurcHMAN (Anglo-Catholic): An adherent of that 
party in the English and Episcopal Churches which 
has retained or revived all or some of the Catholic 
doctrines with the exception of the papal supremacy. 

Hoty RomMAN Emprre (the Germanies): A political and 
territorial federation of central and Teutonic Europe 
founded by the Frankish King Charlemagne in 800 to 
replace the old Roman Empire in the West. In the 
Middle Ages it embraced Germany, Austria and parts 
of Italy, but the actual rule of the Emperor over his 
more distant fiefs was very loose and became merely 
nominal. In 1273 the Empire became hereditary in 
the Hapsburg family, and it was permanently reduced 
to Austria by Bonaparte in 1803. 

Hoty Week: The final week of Lent, kept with special 
solemnity as a period commemorating Christ’s Passion 
and Death. 

Host (Blessed Sacrament): Name given to the wafer 
changed by consecration into the Body of Christ. 


306 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


IMMACULATE CONCEPTION: A belief that the Virgin Mary 
was preserved from original sin in order to be the 
fitting) mother of the God-Man. The 8th of December 
is kept as the annual festival of this doctrine. 

INDULGENCE: A remission of the soul’s temporal expiation 
in Purgatory for sins committed while on earth. 

INFALLIBILITY: The doctrine that the Pope when he speaks 
as the head of the Catholic Church on a question 
affecting faith or morals cannot err. 

INQUISITION (Holy Office): A tribunal for the discovery 
and prevention of heresy instituted by the Holy See 
in the thirteenth century. The Roman Inquisition 
should not be confused with the Spanish one, which, 
being under political control, was much more cruel. 

IntERDIcT: The solemn excommunication of a nation, pro- 
hibiting the public exercise of religion. 


JANSENISM (Port Royal): A faction in the French Church 
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, stem- 
ming from Jansen, Flemish bishop of Ypres in the 
Spanish Netherlands (Belgium). Without being 
Protestant, the Jansenists were influenced by Prot- 
estant ideas, and were celebrated for their austerity. 

Jesuits: A religious order founded in the sixteenth century 
by St. Ignatius Loyola to uphold the papal supremacy 
and combat Protestantism. Suppressed by Pope 
Clement XIV on the ground that they had outlived 
their trustworthiness, they were restored by Pius VII 
after the fall of Napoleon. 

JUSTIFICATION BY FaITH: The keystone of the Protestant 
and especially the Lutheran theology to the effect that 
the soul is saved by a lively faith in the benefits of 
Christ’s Redemption, and hence has no need of the 


GLOSSARY OF ECCLESIASTICAL TERMS 307 


grace derived from the Sacraments or that derived 
from good actions. 


Last RitTEs (Viaticum): The Sacraments conferred on a 
dying person, consisting of Penance, Unction and Holy 
Communion. 

LEGATE (Nuncio): The Pope’s representative in a place 
other than Rome. 

Lent: A period in the Christian year consisting of the 
forty days preceding Easter, and employed in absti- 
nence in memory of Christ’s privations and temptation 
in the wilderness. 

Locos (hypostasis): The expression or incarnation of God, 
a word applied by Greek theologians to Christ as the 
visible God or the mediator between God and man. 


ManicuHetsm (Catharism; Albigensian Church): A heresy 
flourishing in the thirteenth century, particularly in 
the French Midi. It considered matter as the creation 
of the Evil One who is also the Christian God. 

Mass: The principal rite of the Church ordained by Christ 
to afford the faithful an opportunity to receive and 
worship bread and wine transubstantiated by the 
priest’s consecration into Christ’s Body and Blood. 

Mippre Aces: A period in European history beginning 
with the end of the dark ages about the year 1000 
and ending with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks 
in 1453, an event which fully released neo-classic or 
Renaissance ideals. The medieval ideal was moral 
unity under the Papacy and it had a noble and typically 
Catholic culture. 

MopERNISM: A movement in the Catholic Church which 
came to an head during the first years of our century 


808 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


in an attempt to apply the current rationalist methods 
to the Catholic religion. 

MonstTRANCE: A sun-shaped vessel in which the Host is 
set up for adoration at the rite of Benediction. (See 
Benediction. ) 

Mostem (Mussulman; Saracen): A member of the Moham- 
medan Church, whether Arab, Turk or Moor. 


OrpErs: (1) The several grades or ranks in the original 
hierarchy of the Church, that is, the bishops, priests 
and deacons, (2) the Sacrament conferring the specific 
powers associated with each grade. 

OrtTHopox CHuRcH (Greek Church; Eastern Church): 
The Catholic Church in the East, divided from the 
Western, or Latin, Church since the ninth century, when 
it seceded over the definition of the Trinity and the 
papal supremacy. 

OxrorpD Movement: A movement in the Episcopal Church 
of England during the early nineteenth century to 
turn that body back to Catholicism, exception made 
for the papal supremacy. The High Church or Anglo- 
Catholic party in England and the United States is 
the obvious heir of the Oxford school. 


PATRIARCH: The bishop of one of the original centers of 
Christianity. 

PENANCE: The Sacrament popularly called Confession 
conferring absolution through the priest for sins com- 
mitted. 

PENTECOST (Whitsuntide): A period in the Christian year 
beginning with Pentecost Sunday fifty days after Easter 
and commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit on 
the heads of the Christian community at Jerusalem. 


GLOSSARY OF ECCLESIASTICAL TERMS 309 


PLAIN CHANT (Georgian Chant): The traditional music 
composed anonymously by various hands for those 
parts of the Liturgy appointed to be sung. Based on 
a scale other than ours, its melodies seem at first 
monotonous but actually possess an extraordinary 
beauty and variety. 

Pope (Supreme Pontiff; Holy Father): The Bishop of 
Rome and supreme ruler of the Catholic Church under 
Christ. 

PRAGMATISM: A modern philosophy which holds that truth 
is to be measured, not absolutely, but by its practical 
values and results. 

PROTESTANT REFORM (Reformation): A revolt in the six- 
teenth century on the part of certain European coun- 
tries of Germanic stock against the papal supremacy 
and a part or the whole of the Catholic religion. 

Priest: The unit of the ecclesiastical system who may 
operate all the Sacraments save Orders and Confir- 
mation. 

Purcatory: The place or condition of departed souls which 
includes expiation for the sins committed while on 
earth. 

PurITANISM: The religion of the Calvinist party in the 
Episcopal Church of England during the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries. It was expelled from the Eng- 
lish Church on the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 
and emigrated to America, where in the person of 
several Protestant sects it is very strong to-day. 


Romanesoue: A noble style of Christian architecture de- 
rived from Roman forms and characterized by the 
rounded arch. It is seen at its best in northern and 
central Italy. 


810 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


Rosary: A series of prayers in honor of the Virgin recited 
with the aid of a string of beads. This custom was 
inaugurated by St. Dominic in the thirteenth century 
and the first Sunday in October is kept as a feast in 
honor of its introduction. 


SACRAMENT: (1) The visible rite, sign or conductor of 
divine grace to the individual. The four principal Sac- 
raments of the Church are Baptism, Penance, Orders 
and the Eucharist, (2) the Host. 

SacreD Heart: A devotion to the human heart of Jesus, 
considered as the material organ of His divine love. 
The ninth day after the feast of Corpus Christi is 
kept in honor of the Sacred Heart. 

SAINT: One who for extraordinary merits is after canon- 
ization formally commemorated in the Church’s Liturgy 
and may be invoked by prayer. 

ScHism: Secession from the Papacy and formal separation 
from communion with the Church. 

Stn: An offense against God which may be either deadly 
or venial. 

Sout: The spiritual substance which is the principle of 
life in man and is immortal. 

Sprrit (Holy Spirit; Holy Ghost): The third and myste- 
rious Person or Aspect of God. 

Summa: The standard compendium of Catholic theology 
and philosophy, written by the Dominican Saint 
Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. 


TEMPORAL Power: The sovereignty of the popes over 
Rome and the adjacent States of the Church which 
they inherited from the fallen Empire and which was 
guaranteed to them by Charlemagne. It was taken 


GLOSSARY OF ECCLESIASTICAL TERMS 311 


away when Italy became a united kingdom under the 
House of Savoy in 1870. 

TENEBRAE: The solemn service of Matins and Lauds for the 
Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of Holy Week, 
sung in memory of Christ’s Passion and Death. (See 
Canonical Hours.) 

TRANSUBSTANTIATION: The Catholic doctrine of the Real 
Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. A belief that the 
elements of bread and wine are changed by a miracle 
unperceived by the senses into the substance of His 
Body and Blood. 

TRINITY: The mystery of three Persons in one God. 


ULTRAMONTANISM: The nineteenth century doctrine of the 
papal supremacy as opposed to ideas tending to make 
national churches independent of the Pope’s authority. 

Unction: The Sacrament of anointing a sick or dying 
person with holy oil. | 

Untat: A member of one of the national churches in 
eastern Europe or the near Orient which are in com- 
munion with Rome but are permitted to retain their 
own rites and usages. 





CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 


A.D. 
30 Alleged Crucifixion of Jesus. 
51 Appearance of Paul. 

313 Edict of Milan. 

325 Council of Nicea; first “ecumenical” council of the 
Church. 

379 Battle of Adrianople: Beginning of barbarian in- 
vasions, 

430 Death of Augustin. 

476 Fall of Western Empire: beginning of temporal 

power of the Pope. 

526 End of Theodoric’s Kingdom at Ravenna; beginning 
of Dark Ages. 

622 The Hegira; beginning of the Mohammedan era. 

800 Coronation of Charlemagne: beginning of Holy 
Roman Empire. 

870 Treaty of Mersen; division of Empire into France, 
Germany and Italy. 

970 Secession of France from Holy Roman Empire. 

1000 Millennial year: beginning of Middle Ages. 

1059 Election of Popes delivered to Cardinals. 

1095 The First Crusade. 

1198-1216 Pontificate of Innocent JII: climax of the Papal 
Supremacy. 

1210 Foundation of Franciscan Order. 

1270 The Last Crusade. 

1293 Accession of Rudolf of Hapsburg: the Holy Roman 
Empire becomes Austria. 

313 


814 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 


1300 Jubilee of Boniface VIII. 

1305 Beginning of Babylonian Captivity. 

1378 Beginning of Great Schism. 

1418 Completion of Council of Constance: end of Cap- 
tivity and Schism. 

1517 Appearance of Luther: beginning of Protestant 
Reformation. 

1555 Peace of Augsburg, establishing ,Protestantism in 
North Germany. 

1559 Act of Supremacy reénforced by Elizabeth separating 
English Church from Rome. 

1563 Completion of Council of Trent: beginning of 
Counter-Reform. 

1570-1587 Persecution of Roman Catholics in England. 

1588 Defeat of Spanish Armada. 

1648 Peace of Westphalia: end of religious wars. 

1773 Suppression of the Jesuits. 

1789 Beginning of French Revolution. 

1799 Capture of Pius VI by the French. 

1802 Concordat of Napoleon and Pius VIII, reéstablishing 
the Church in France. 

1828-1829 Catholic emancipation in England. 

1846 Accession of Pius IX. 

‘1870 Proclamation of Papal Infallibility. 

1870 End of the Temporal Power. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


GENERAL HISTORIES: 
A Short History of Christianity. By Salomon Reinach. 
Alzog: Manual of Church History. 
HISTORIES OF CHRISTIAN IDEAS: 
Adolph Harnack: History of Dogma. 
G. P. Fisher: History of Christian Thought. 
ON THE HISTORICITY OF JESUS: 
Kalthoff: Was Wissen Wir von Jesus? (Berlin, 1904.) 
Benjamin Smith: Ecce Deus. (Jena, 1911.) 
Arthur Drews: Die Christusmyth. (Jena, rgrt.) 
J. M. Robertson: The Historical Jesus. (London, 
1916.) 
Alfred Loisy: Jésus et la Tradition Evangelique. 
(Paris, 1910.) 
Charles Guignébert: La Probleme de Jésus. (Paris, 
1914.) 
ON THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH; ef seq.: 
Dean Inge: Saint Paul (Outspoken Essays, London, 
1920.) 
Henri Delafosse: La Quatriéme Evangile. (Paris, 
1925.) 
A. P. Stanley: The Eastern Church. 
Comte de Montalembert: The Monks of the West. 
Ranke: History of the Popes. 
Oskar Meyer: England and the Catholic Church. 
Mer. Bernard Ward: The Eve, Dawn and Sequel of 
Catholic Emancipation in England. 
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